The goal is to create a separate caste of people with minimal rights or access to due process. The most useful targets for this project are those people that have the most fractured support networks.
This will provide corporations both with a subsidized labor pool, but also a chip against the bargaining position of any tenuously enfranchised citizens. The threat is also aimed at them, as those who stick their necks out will risk becoming a member of the de jure dispossessed. Individuals who become a target of the justice system can generally count on losing their ability to participate in any semblance of a democratic process, such as voting, standing for office, applying for licenses, or being eligible to seek redress in a civil court.
The goal of liberals will always be to roll back enfranchisement along lines that conform with their worldview, such as to individuals that have title to property or those who have parallel interests.
I hate Trump, but here are a few quotes from the Executive Order that are not as onerous as some want to make it sound.
*"**Section* *1**.* *Purpose and Policy**. Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe. The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions. The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.*
*"Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens. "*
So, can someone tell me what is wrong with the above statement assuming we build **humane and nurturing** infrastructure (which we have so far failed to do) for drug addiction and mental illness treatment?
In my city THOUSANDS of people who are mentally ill or drug addicted die all '"wrapped up in their rights" because they have the "right" to refuse treatment.
How about kids in my city having to walk through needles in parks and on the way to school - or sidewalks and parks filled with garbage.
You might as well look into the Johnson v. Grants Pass ruling and its consequences. Rather than look at what any municipal government or ruling junta is saying, look at what they are actually doing.
June 2023 to July 2024 - [22,839 homeless people were jailed.](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/02/11/jail_unhoused_bookings/)
Even before the ruling, [at least 187 cities had enacted laws criminalizing homelessness.](https://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_0518.shtml)
The main incentive for the justice system to incarcerate people is to use them as publicly subsidized, coerced labor in private corporations. This allows those corporations to use them as a bargaining chip against the already poor negotiating position of non-criminalized labor. It amounts to an highly organized system of graft and patronage between politicians receiving [campaign contributions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) and the businesses which are in a position to take advantage of this mass scale exploitation.
It is a well known practice that low level, low-risk offenders are preferentially held within incarceration systems because they have low overhead cost and their exploitation is valued for the "stability" it brings to those systems. In Louisiana, it was documented by the ACLU as recently as 2023 that carceral programs were systematically withholding "[good time}(https://www.axios.com/local/new-orleans/2024/08/01/louisiana-parole-criminal-justice-good-time-release)" points from prisoners engaged in hard labor, mainly as a way to delay early parole. It is basically impossible to prove that these organizations are responding to perverse incentives, given the scant amount of oversight, except through the objective outcomes.
So you are claiming that no percentage of unhoused people are committing crimes?
As for the rest of your response, apparently you are not living with the chaos and fallout that millions of Americans are living with when homeless camps come to their neighborhoods - usually the poorest neighborhoods - only because we refuse to compel treatment for people who are mentally ill and drug addicted. "Just let them die in the streets" is the reigning ethic.
Last, using prisons for free labor is abominable, but that's another topic altogether.
As Durkheim pointed out, crime is a flexible concept that mostly hinges on how useful it is. Plenty of the same "crimes" occur behind closed doors. We call that place the suburbs.
Everyone has to sleep. Everyone has to eat and deal with its inevitable consequence. To make it inevitable that everyone must serve the interests of the oligarchs, additional effort is required. As Anatole France pointed out, *"It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."*
Dude, I have homeless camps just blocks from where I live where drug manufacture; drug dealing; stolen bike and car parting out and prostitution take place **nightly.** My neighbors have been threatened with gunfire from people in those camps**.**
I want to help the homeless as much as anyone, but until we start compelling treatment of mentally ill and drug addicted unhoused persons, the problem will accelerate and unhoused people will suffer at the hands of community members who have had enough and vote in less liberal politicians.
Violence begets violence, yet how often have we failed to acknowledge our own role in the violence against the dispossessed? It is not simply a fear of joining their ranks, but of seeing ourselves as a mirror.
It isn't just the NIMBYs that have been deepening the polycrisis that subsumes housing and all other concerns for the last seventy years.
I wonder how effective the word "polycrisis" will be when I confront the "unhoused" drug dealer down the street the next time he tried to break into my car.
I get where you're coming from, but you're not living this the way I an literally millions of other housed persons are.
We're not evil and we're not the enemy and yes, corporations have helped to cause this problem, but goddamn it there is no way that regular citizens should put up with chaos in the streets.
In fact, your ideas get unhoused people **killed** by the thousands because even though 2/3 are mentally ill (or drig addicted, or both), the have the "right" to refuse treatment so they end up going back to the streets where they die, "wrapped up in their rights"
More public resources are dedicated to protecting and housing every car in a city than are spent on assisting human beings in getting out of the elements.
People who own homes on average have forty fold more assets than the average renter, and yet still insist on more measures that supposedly protect their narrow interests. In reality, restrictions on housing developments increase their total costs in the long run through bankrupting cities and terminally deferred infrastructure maintenance. Every new suburb created adds further economic fragility to the community upon which it is parasitically inflicted.
It is disingenuous to conflate a housing crisis with a self-medication crisis. There are far more housed persons engaging in the latter, than unhoused. The overwhelming majority of the ranks of newly unhoused are employed people with families, most with no dependency issues. While being unhoused would drive any normal person to the mental limits of precarity, the canard is mainly used as a way for people who believe their interests run contrary to the dispossessed to dehumanize them.
What you're missing is the literal championing of the worst of the unhoused behavior; it's as if you can't see that there are sociopaths within every subculture, like the sociopaths within the unhoused community who prey on other unhoused people and the communities around them.
It's also sad to see people actually promoting the idea that we should leave seriously mentally ill and drug addicted people on the streets because it's their "right" to refuse treatment - a "right" usually reinforced by those who don't see their complicity in the dystopia of homeless camps by protecting those "rights"
This is being done ahead of the countless droves of homeless that will flood the streets when medicaid and medicare cuts impacted elderly wind up on the streets with no option. America will be the land of elderly dying in cages. Pathetic country.
No, think about this logically. It costs so much money to keep people caged up. They will either find a way to profit off of them or find a way to eliminate them.
They will do BOTH exactly as their role models, the Nazis, did.
It's private corporations running everything - detention centers, Aligator Alley, etc.
The basic principle was developed way back in the 70's: your company produces a lot of toxic waste and suddenly they're not allowed to just dump it in the river upstream of everyone's drinking water. What to do? Just build a temporary holding pond to contain it until a long term solution is found. Conveniently it happens to be in the flood plain of the river.
A few years later, no solution has been found and then, what a surprise! (NOT!) there's a flood and the contents are conveniently flushed into the river. "Rinse" and repeat.
NOW ICE is doing it with PEOPLE! Building a containment facility in an alligator and mosquito infested swamp right in the middle of hurricane alley. Then ... SURPRISE (not actually) a hurricane and accompanying flood destroy the facility and what few inmates survive that are disposed of by alligators.
Every one of the depravities now being committed and planned by our OPENLY fascist government is just building on previous depravities that have been steadily escalating ever since Reagan declared government to be public enemy number one and that welfare recipients were fraudsters.
All that's different is that Trump is broadening (liberalizing, if you will!) the categories to be disposed of and making the tools more effective.
And most Americans have decided to "shelter in place" hoping the storm will pass over them. THIS storm will not stop until the USA is in ruins exactly as Germany was at the end of WWII.. Look at videos of Germany in the late 40's and early 50's. People were utterly desperate. It will be much worse this time.
Trump is using immigrants to harden up his storm troopers to get them ready to deal with the real target: US.
We're already nazis. They are literally pulling people off the street based on skin color and almost nothing else and deporting them to death camps in foreign countries.
I really don’t understand why they haven’t been rioting in the streets since trump took over. The left in America has been neutered beyond recognition.
Jobs are tied to healthcare. Rioting sounds cool and all over there until you remember we just funded ICE to the point they are comparable with a nation's military. And people don't like dying.
That’s the other half of the problem we never want to talk about: we only care about ourselves and our people. America’s rugged individualism has matured into a self interested society of people without a strong sense of community.
This right here is the nail on the head. There's 0 sense of community and people are indeed super selfish. Not a lot of people seem to be willing to help out a stranger anymore, let alone a pack of them.
Oh no your facist rapist dropkick stupid government has funded their private police! Guess you better just stay in doors and hope you’re white then :(
Dumb take.
This. Grow up in the USA and see what we are dealing with. I saw a friend dragged from his car and straight up assaulted by the police, just because he was black, as a teenager. He’s lucky to be alive. I get reprimanded by my employer for daring to talk about nazis and fascism on LinkedIn, threatening my ability to survive just for making a few comments. I have a disease that would likely kill me if I lose my health insurance. It’s easy to sit in Europe, where you have actually rights and social safety nets, and criticize Americans for not doing more. I’d personally like to stay alive a little longer. I have a wife and dog that need me. If I start a riot or attack the authorities they will just straight up murder me and it won’t even make the news.
The only thing we can do that is not criminalized (yet) and would not get ourselves killed by cops (yet) is stop having kids, but you all believe in the "raise dragon slayers" bullshit or just YOLO
illegal state of mind refusing to cooperate in pulling society where people live in dwellings in an area where they can afford such dwelling not loitering in and area incompatible with their economic capacity
This action should come as no surprise. Trump has spoken about it many times. It’s the low-hanging fruit that opens the door to others deemed as undesirable to be rounded up. If there are indeed 770,000 homeless in the US, it’s not at all clear where they will be sent. But rounding them up and putting them in camps follows on to the treatment of migrants so just another step down the slippery slope. And the most disturbing thing is that a lot of us will be glad they are gone. So then who’s next?
Don't forget the free prison labor, once these "undesirables" are collected and "reeducated" they will likely send the useful healthy people to prisons for labor reasons.
Honestly they’ll probably force homeless people to labor in the fields to take over the brown skinned people currently sitting in a flooded cage in the Everglades or “rendered” to South Sudan.
Well, given that is says mentally ill people will also be institutionalized, homeless or not, they are clearly planning on coming for a large swath of the disability community (assuming from neurodiverse conditions like autism and Tourette’s to mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar).
And who’s to say what they will count as mental illness? If you include things like ADHD, anxiety, and depression, they could round up a large swath of the population.
Then there’s also the push to make Trump Derangement Syndrome a mental illness. That’s a convenient way to get rid of political opponents.
And the EO mentions evaluating the homeless for “sexually dangerous persons.” I’m imagining that’s code speak for the LGBTQIA community.
All in all this is a huge increase in populations they intend to detain and house in facilities without any due process.
The "in" group shrinks by the day as these fascist regimes remain in power over time. Fascism by any other name is a death cult, which is why it feels so good to the deeply religious.
I remember over a decade ago Alex Jones and other right wing nutjobs were banging on about FEMA camps, and now it's happening, only FEMA has been neutered and it's the right who are locking people up.
Not just homeless people; read the EO again. It's anyone who an authority might declare to be mentally ill or not in a "normal" state of mind. That's dangerously subjective.
Also consider that there really is no institutional capacity to hold them as ordered. But ICE just received an order of magnitude budget increase to build more concentration camps.
Trump took on the true face he always wanted. The villain. The feeling here in Brazil is that Americans deserve to get fucked for what they did to the world. Of course, not all Americans. The taxes imposed on countries are being circumvented, as we can send products to other countries. You guys are screwed with Trump.
>“crack down on homelessness”
Maybe fix the fucking economy so that people can get medical and housing assistance when they need it instead of trying to criminalize everyone for their misfortunes.
As terrible in its immediate effects as this executive order is, in the longer term it will also be likely to be felt by the many millions of people who will be made homeless by climate disasters. Collapse doesn't necessarily come for all of us at once - it picks us off piecemeal in ones or twos, or clusters of hundreds or thousands in the wake of floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes. The process of civilisational collapse is happening now. For some people, their personal civilisational collapse is happening today (like it has already for those living on the streets) - it's only luck and/or privilege that it isn't us.
Legislation like this are about making the privileged feel comfy, and keeping the borders of their curated world neat and tidy and unblemished by reality - even as their world is crumbling.
An executive order is NOT legislation; it's an non-constitutional poisoned chalice given to the country by Washington. Washington's first EO should've been immediately over-turned by Congress and declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
i'm expecting down the line that he is going to declare being socialist is a mental illness, being LGBT is a mental illness (especially trans), being a democrat is a mental illness, and group by group they will criminalize the opposition, and lock them away in 'institutions' aka jails and prisons and alligator alcatrazes
OR people With a mental illness.
It’s important to add that it’s not just about the “ unhoused” they added this “ OR” about people with mental illnesses.
How do you force people to do all those jobs "Americans won't do"? You threaten them with being sent to a concentration camp with no way of getting out of it (how do you get a job and a home while sitting in a tent far from anywhere surrounded by fences and barbed wire?).
Landlords are going to have a field day. "Rent is going up! Pay up or I'll evict and report you as homeless."
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Portalrules123:
---
SS: Related to societal and governmental collapse for a number of reasons. One, Trump is attempting to ‘overturn state and federal judicial precedents’ surrounding homelessness with an executive order, a fairly unprecedented move in and of itself that is a clear executive power grab and an undermining of checks and balances. Two, since the Reagan days and his closure of many institutions there haven’t been nearly enough of said institutions to house the rising homeless population, so where are these people supposed to go? This is yet another step in the Republican quest to gradually criminalize homelessness under the guise of ‘protecting Americans’. As income inequality continues to rise, more and more people are going to find themselves at least temporarily homeless, and this broad order implies they all deserve to be shoved away, out of sight and out of mind. There’s also another slippery slope in that the order also seeks to institutionalize those deemed mentally ill, leaving the future door wide open to classify various ‘undesirables’ like trans people and even those who merely criticize him
as deserving of institutionalization. Expect private prisons and institutions run by wealthy elites to begin bigly profiting off of this national order to, in other words, remove undesirables from public view. Things are starting to smell a lot like fascism. Camping on public land may be a nuisance sometimes but removing the right to do so is fairly authoritarian.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1m8jwnd/trump_executive_order_pushes_local_officials_to/n4zv6i1/
SS: Related to societal and governmental collapse for a number of reasons. One, Trump is attempting to ‘overturn state and federal judicial precedents’ surrounding homelessness with an executive order, a fairly unprecedented move in and of itself that is a clear executive power grab and an undermining of checks and balances. Two, since the Reagan days and his closure of many institutions there haven’t been nearly enough of said institutions to house the rising homeless population, so where are these people supposed to go? This is yet another step in the Republican quest to gradually criminalize homelessness under the guise of ‘protecting Americans’. As income inequality continues to rise, more and more people are going to find themselves at least temporarily homeless, and this broad order implies they all deserve to be shoved away, out of sight and out of mind. There’s also another slippery slope in that the order also seeks to institutionalize those deemed mentally ill, leaving the future door wide open to classify various ‘undesirables’ like trans people and even those who merely criticize him
as deserving of institutionalization. Expect private prisons and institutions run by wealthy elites to begin bigly profiting off of this national order to, in other words, remove undesirables from public view. Things are starting to smell a lot like fascism.
94 Comments
lowrads@reddit
opinionsareus@reddit
lowrads@reddit
opinionsareus@reddit
lowrads@reddit
opinionsareus@reddit
lowrads@reddit
opinionsareus@reddit
lowrads@reddit
opinionsareus@reddit
Globalboy70@reddit
lowrads@reddit
DryOpportunity9064@reddit
Shamelesscumslutlove@reddit
-Calm_Skin-@reddit
Constitutive_Outlier@reddit
LongjumpingJob3452@reddit
lavapig_love@reddit
M0O53@reddit
Constitutive_Outlier@reddit
Bored_Acolyte_44@reddit
_LeBigMac@reddit
PennysWorthOfTea@reddit
DastardlyMime@reddit
PennysWorthOfTea@reddit
-Calm_Skin-@reddit
DingerSinger2016@reddit
Pandamm0niumNO3@reddit
Wow_u_sure_r_dumb@reddit
Pandamm0niumNO3@reddit
_LeBigMac@reddit
DingerSinger2016@reddit
jez_shreds_hard@reddit
SleepsInAlkaline@reddit
blueteamk087@reddit
EnoughAd2682@reddit
CockItUp@reddit
TheArcticFox444@reddit
itsadiseaster@reddit
Hairy-Chipmunk7921@reddit
Psychological-Sport1@reddit
Collapse2043@reddit
Lord_Vesuvius2020@reddit
JPGer@reddit
balki42069@reddit
whatevers_cleaver_@reddit
balki42069@reddit
whatevers_cleaver_@reddit
ericvulgaris@reddit
Septapus007@reddit
whatevers_cleaver_@reddit
whatevers_cleaver_@reddit
00001000U@reddit
SonicTemp1e@reddit
lavapig_love@reddit
NorCalFrances@reddit
-Calm_Skin-@reddit
NorCalFrances@reddit
pespisheros@reddit
-Calm_Skin-@reddit
PessimisticHumanist@reddit
-Calm_Skin-@reddit
37iteW00t@reddit
-Calm_Skin-@reddit
Contagious_Zombie@reddit
shadowofpurple@reddit
Contagious_Zombie@reddit
shadowofpurple@reddit
Quarks4branes@reddit
AlwaysPissedOff59@reddit
Zaynara@reddit
Tidezen@reddit
_borT@reddit
Brigid_Fitch2112@reddit
balki42069@reddit
JPGer@reddit
Nook_n_Cranny@reddit
Temporary-Concept-81@reddit
Ching-Dai@reddit
Particular-Jello-401@reddit
JosBosmans@reddit
combatcrew141@reddit
WattaTravisT@reddit
tomatoeberries@reddit
oldcreaker@reddit
DissedFunction@reddit
WhyDoIEvenBotheridk@reddit
Square_Difference435@reddit
TacoMullet@reddit
CerddwrRhyddid@reddit
Someones_Dream_Guy@reddit
Jeffformayor@reddit
StatementBot@reddit
Portalrules123@reddit (OP)