Trump’s unprecedented Washington takeover is more of same for homeless | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Trump's DC occupation echoes national homeless crackdowns, not major reform.
- Encampment sweeps displace homeless while failing to provide housing access.
- Both parties endorse actions that criminalize homelessness without real solutions.
Apologies to “Big Balls,” but none of this is necessary.
One violent crime, even against Edward Coristine, one of DOGE’s once-favored sons, does not justify the militarized occupation of the entire city of Washington. The district’s well-documented crime issues still compare favorably to other cities such as Cleveland, Dayton or Toledo, Ohio — municipalities with FBI-compiled violent crime rates higher than the capital. That didn’t stop their state’s Republican governor from sending National Guard troops away from the action to support the siege of a city that the data suggests is empirically safer.
That’s right: consistent with national trends across many large cities, the district’s violent crime rate plummeted to its lowest rate in 30 years, according to Department of Justice data. Now, I’ve watched enough episodes of “The Wire” to concede, as President Donald Trump and the Metropolitan Police Department’s police union alleged, at least the possibility that the district somehow cooked the books. However, back in April, the Trump administration loudly took credit for the ongoing reported decreases in crime.
Should Trump be blamed for patting himself on the back while Washington continued to fester into an apparent war zone? For now, we have regular footage of DC residents pounded into the pavement, not by their civilian neighbors but by the soldiers, ICE agents and police the president commandeered to restore order, one cracked skull at a time. Ensuing protests in Washington give the rest of us a sense of what much of the city makes of its newfound protectors.
Though Trump’s escalation is distinct in its capriciousness and cruelty, there is one aspect of the takeover that, though grievous, is familiar across virtually every American city. Trump’s punishment of the homeless, supercharged and demonstrative as it may be, varies little from the logic governing many city and state approaches to so-called public safety.
”The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “There will be no “MR. NICE GUY. We want our Capital BACK.” Promises made, promises kept: Since the occupation, troops have torn down tented communities across the district and harassed their inhabitants. Possessing a more durable memory than a beetle, or saving that, some Google skills, will help you make sense of these escalations.
Destroying a homeless camp does not alleviate homelessness, but simply pushes the homeless out of immediate sight and mind. Seizing and disposing of property often result in vital personal items getting lost in the shuffle. This includes documentation like IDs, birth certificates, and social security cards needed for obtaining food, medicine and financial assistance that might eventually help some homeless people get back on their feet, as well as personal mementos like photos of family and heirlooms that make survival worth the struggle.
We know this, in part, because the Biden administration studied and outlined the failures of encampment sweeps. That did not stop our last president, on multiple occasions and as recently as 2024, from coordinating with DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, to destroy capital encampments, federal housing policy breaches be damned. National Homelessness Law Center executive director Antonia Fasanelli said at the time that she was “speechless” as to “how an agency can issue a plan and blatantly violate it two months later.”
Zoom out further, and you’ll see the same story stuck on repeat. In 2024, New York City spent $3.5 million removing 2,300 camps, with only 114 of the displaced 3,500 New Yorkers being placed into shelter and zero being placed into permanent housing. Boston banned and bulldozed homeless tents, leaving their inhabitants to seek refuge on park and subway benches.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, arguably the most vocal elected opponent of Trump, proposed a model ordinance for cities to follow that would force unsheltered Californians to move every three days, effectively making street homelessness illegal. Ron DeSantis’ Florida made sleeping in public illegal statewide while empowering residents to sue their cities and counties for failing to enforce the ban. Who said bipartisanship is dead?
Tynan Stewart, author of the (dearly missed) Lost In Panther City newsletter, chronicled Fort Worth’s recent history of homeless hostility, including a 2022 Christmastime raze under I-35. A CBS producer who spoke to the former residents said the homeless people who spoke told him “nobody from the local or county governments came to offer help or resources.” Without any place to go — the Tarrant County Housing Assistance Office’s voucher wait list, for example, has been closed since 2017, according to the county website — clearouts don’t solve their immediate needs.
The drug use doesn’t stop. The erratic behavior might get worse. All that’s accomplished is that the rest of us get to pretend something got fixed, which makes real solutions — namely, housing for those who lack it — even further out of reach. Trump has made his lack of interest in solving that problem clear. The invasion may be new, but the evasion is ordinary.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 11:41 AM with the headline "Trump’s unprecedented Washington takeover is more of same for homeless | Opinion."
