The Legal System Has Abandoned Poor People to Trump's Cruelest Impulses - Balls and Strikes

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

In his ongoing quest to find the most vulnerable group of people on whom he can inflict needless cruelty, President Donald Trump has spent several weeks promising to make life even more challenging for homeless people in Washington, D.C. On Sunday, he posted on Truth Social that unhoused people would have to leave “IMMEDIATELY,” and to go “FAR from the Capital” for their next place to stay. The next day, he announced plans to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department and deploy the National Guard to remove encampments from “our beautiful, beautiful parks,” which, he says, are too “dirty” to enjoy anymore.

“Some of those people are from different countries, different parts of the world—nobody knows who they are, they have no idea, but they’re there,” Trump added, because there is nothing his brain can conceptualize separately from the xenophobia that animates his entire political agenda. “They’ll not be allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.” White House officials haven’t been forthcoming about specific plans for implementing the directive, but advocates in D.C. expected sweeps to start on Thursday morning, and arrests to begin in the evening. The president has decided that he does not want to see poor people anymore, and does not particularly care what it will take to effectuate that result.

The sweeps in D.C. are happening a year and change after the Supreme Court’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the six conservative justices lifted even modest constitutional restrictions on local government officials’ authority to criminalize homelessness. And although it would be wrong to say that Trump’s vow to banish D.C.’s unhoused population to places unknown is directly attributable to Grants Pass, they are not unrelated, either: The Court’s decision and this week’s crackdown are part of a long, bipartisan tradition of powerful people washing their hands of responsibility for their failed policy choices. Ensuring the availability of stable, affordable housing requires solving hard problems. Empowering cops to harass people dozing on benches is easy, which is why lazy politicians who are bad at their jobs keep doing it.

Speaking of which: Since the Court decided Grants Pass, elected officials in cities across the country have introduced more than 320 bills criminalizing unhoused people, according to the ACLU; nearly 220 of these bills have passed. And Trump’s victory in November gave officials a powerful new ally: In an executive order issued in July, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to prioritize grants for state and local governments that, among other things, agree to enforce camping bans “to the maximum extent permitted by law.” To the extent that mayors and city councilmembers might feel privately reluctant to start bulldozing encampments, the possibility of losing valuable federal funding could lead many to feel as if they have no choice.

The sweeps in D.C. are part of a legal and political culture whose primary solution to homelessness is arresting the people who are experiencing it

— Balls & Strikes (@ballsandstrikes.org) 2025-08-14T20:38:00.846Z

[Solly Mack]

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