DC’s Homeless Have Nowhere to Go. Trump Might Send Them to Jail.

Stephanie W., 28, who is homeless, rests on a foam mattress as a United States Park Police vehicle drives past on Wednesday in northwest Washington near the Kennedy Center. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

On the 26-mile motorcade ride from the White House to his private golf club in Northern Virginia (one of 18 in his collection), President Donald Trump observed a few tents on public land and some garbage under an overpass. Perturbed by the imagery, he issued a sweeping demand via his social media site, Truth Social: “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.”

“We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump continued in his Sunday post. “Be prepared!”

The command came as he made plans to deploy 800 National Guard members to DC and temporarily federalize the city’s police department, which he announced in a rambling 79-minute press conference the next day.

Advocates for homeless people immediately pointed to a fundamental problem (one of many) with Trump’s order: There aren’t enough shelter beds in the nation’s capital. Accordingly, how can homeless people prepare if they have nowhere to go?

“We really don’t know what that looks like,” Andy Wassenich, the policy director of the local nonprofit Miriam’s Kitchen, which provides free food and social services in DC, tells me.

And if Trump’s plan for removing homeless people from the District is hazy, so is his rationale. In his zig-zagging speech from the briefing-room podium, Trump described an anarchistic hellscape home to “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, [and] drugged out maniacs and homeless people.” The description perhaps conjured visuals of sprawling tent encampments where rape and assault problems run rampant, but the depiction doesn’t match the reality: US Park Police have already removed 70 DC tent encampments in response to an an executive order Trump signed in March, and violent crime in the city is actually at a 30-year low. To the extent that unhoused people still live outside in DC, most sleep alone or in small clusters. This subgroup of the unhoused surely isn’t welcoming crime, of which they are disproportionately victims. They too want law enforcement to arrest dangerous criminals in DC—homeless or not.

Wassenich’s concern is that unhoused people minding their own business will be targeted along with the alleged criminals Trump has vowed to crack down on. On Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that was indeed a possibility.

“Homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment, to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services,” said Leavitt. “And if they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time.” 

Among those at risk is 66-year-old Larry, who did not provide his last name. Sitting on a park bench in Dupont Circle, where he has spent most of his days since losing his housing in June, Larry explains that keeping a roof over his head had never been an issue until his wife passed away from kidney failure in 2022. Her death meant the loss of the earned income she contributed to their household, but more importantly, it deprived Larry of his will to get out of bed in the morning.

“I didn’t feel like I could go on,” he tells me. “When I finally came back to reality, I ended up outside.”

Alongside the DC National Guard, which was mobilized Tuesday, the newly federalized DC police could theoretically arrest Larry for sleeping in Dupont Circle, which—like much of DC—is considered federal property.

The Supreme Court legitimized this practice in a 2024 decision in which the conservative justices ruled that the city of Grants Pass, Oregon could fine and arrest unhoused people for sleeping outside, even though there weren’t sufficient homeless shelter beds to accommodate them.

Larry is concerned about the possibility of arrest in DC and takes extra measures to prevent it. He doesn’t have a tent—just a pushcart and a backpack. He says he is most comfortable sleeping during the daytime and doesn’t lie down to avoid trouble. “I sleep sitting up,” he says. (At night, he says, he posts up at a better-lit bus stop, but doesn’t fall asleep).

Like Grants Pass, DC also lacks enough shelter beds. “In DC, there are, right now, 30 open shelter beds for men and 30 open shelter beds for women in places that are very hard to get to and places that people don’t generally want to go,” explains Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center. “So for all intents and purposes, there’s nowhere else for people to go.”

Among those on the street, several unhoused people I spoke to say they were generally supportive of an increased presence of law enforcement dedicated to arresting violent crimes offenders—they just don’t want to be lumped in with them.

“Keep the violent people away,” Henry Johnson, an unhoused man selling Street Sense newspapers in Georgetown, tells me in 90-degree heat.

Experts point out that it’s more likely for an unhoused person to be the victim of violence—between 14 and 2021 percent of the unhoused population is affected, versus less than 2 percent of the general population. “Does that mean there are no violent offenders in the homeless community?” Wassenich says. “Of course not.”

“But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he continued. “Deal with the ones who are dangerous. Let everybody else be.”

Thus far, DC police haven’t announced any arrests based solely on someone’s status of being unhoused. (Nor did the department respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.) But in the meantime, Wassenich says, we can expect unhoused people to scatter to further corners of the city—where it isn’t as easy for places like Miriam’s Kitchen to help them find food and shelter, or keep track of their wellbeing.

“You can sweep away an encampment, but you’re not sweeping away homelessness,” Wassenich says. “The person is still homeless, they’re just in a different spot.”