Portside

Strongbow Lone Eagle, 56, was charged with trespassing on the New Haven Green, where he had been staying in a tent. Police also took him in on warrants for failure to register his address as a sex offender. Lone Eagle literally did not have an address. The green was the very spot that the state Department of Correction had dropped him off when he finished serving his sentence, with all of $400 in his pocket. Lone Eagle called the experience, which included a night in jail, “mind-boggling.”

He is caught in the homelessness/incarceration cycle, which has gotten increasingly vicious of late. In its 2024 Grants Pass decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments may arrest or fine people for sleeping on public land. Since then, more than 200 municipalities have passed ordinances against people sleeping outdoors. In July, President Donald Trump issued an executive order further criminalizing homelessness and directing federal funding toward jurisdictions taking punitive approaches to unsheltered people. The executive order followed closely on the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included massive cuts to health and nutrition programs for low-income communities. The administration is also proposing cuts and time limits for the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8), which provides rental assistance. It is a perfect storm aimed at people who were already soaking wet.

The criminalization of homelessness is not new. People who have been incarcerated are ten times as likely to become unhoused as the general public, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Meanwhile, people living unsheltered had an average of 21 interactions with police over a six-month period, according to a study that the California Policy Lab conducted in fifteen states.

The old idea of punishing people for being unhoused is getting new, well-financed backing. The Cicero Institute advocates involuntary commitment to mental health facilities of unhoused people and is critical of “housing first” approaches that get people off the streets rapidly with offers of voluntary treatment. The Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

The think tank provides model legislation to encourage states to criminalize homelessness. Its literature blames the housing-first philosophy for the increase in homelessness but does not mention the rising cost of housing. (A 2022 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts quantified the intuitive lesson: When rents go up, homelessness follows.) The Cicero Institute’s materials foment fear of unhoused people, whom they paint as a source of addiction-fueled crime. Trump’s executive order is titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.”

Cicero has promoted criminalization of homelessness bills for two years running in Indiana, and housing advocates expect to see them back next session. The bills were defeated in the red state by a coalition that included hospitals, advocates, and police. “It’s an additional mandate on law enforcement, just like it is a mandate and a burden on housing providers and community services and local governments,” said Andrew Bradley, senior director of policy and strategy at Prosperity Indiana.

The model legislation promoted by the Cicero Institute directs states to stop funding housing first and instead fund camps and shelters.

Cicero had better luck in neighboring Kentucky, where punitive legislation passed and led to police issuing a citation to an unhoused woman in active labor. “Prosperity Indiana has heard from our partners in southern Indiana, that are literally across the river from Kentucky, that they are seeing people experiencing homelessness coming across the river to avoid some of that criminalization,” Bradley said.

Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center, tracked the expansion of the Cicero Institute in the past decade with “an explosion of anti-homeless laws … there now literal billionaires with substantive political influence and a political structure peddling this misinformation across the country.”

Rabinowitz described the Cicero Institute as “deeply tied to the Trump administration.” Cicero’s founder is Joe Lonsdale, a venture capitalist and co-founder of Palantir who is friends with Elon Musk and business partner with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a mentor to Vice President JD Vance. “We know that Joe Lonsdale meets with the White House,” Rabinowitz said. “So it’s our analysis that the Cicero Institute is all over this executive order, and the executive order is one of the worst things to happen to people experiencing homelessness in decades.”

“Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order,” the executive order reads. Where unhoused people will get this forced treatment, and from whom, is uncertain. Nearly half of the U.S. adults in need of mental health treatment do not receive it, according to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, in part because of a severe shortage of providers. That analysis predates an $11 billion Trump revocation of funding for states to support mental health and addiction services, and the trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid, the largest payer for these services in the U.S, under the Big Beautiful Bill.

Cicero’s website proclaims that 75 percent of people who are unsheltered are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Various studies estimate the prevalence of dependency differently, but Cicero’s claim definitely has a chicken/egg problem. People who did not previously abuse substances may begin doing so because of the trauma and stress of homelessness. For example, a Canadian study associated becoming unhoused with starting injection drug use. If you want to keep people off drugs, the data suggests that getting them into housing is a sound strategy.

Asked for details about facilities to receive unhoused people under the executive order, the White House Press Office provided a fact sheet that included no such details. An internet search found no requests for proposals to build or operate facilities related to the executive order. But it did turn up an interesting video produced by Lonsdale’s former company Palantir, touting its capacity to track unhoused people.

Prior to beginning his second term, President-elect Trump issued a video saying that he would ban urban camping and “create tent cities where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.” Will unhoused people become the new immigrants, a profit center for the surveillance and detention industries? The model legislation promoted by Cicero directs states to stop funding housing first and instead fund camps and shelters that meet specific requirements. For-profit entities operating these facilities have generous protection from liability under the model legislation, which reads: “A private campground owner or an employee or officer of a private campground operating such facility pursuant to this section shall be immune from liability for all civil claims, excluding claims involving the person’s intentional or grossly negligent conduct, arising out of the ownership, operation, management, or other control of such facility.”

Tracie Bernardi Guzman, founder of the nonprofit Reentry Solutions CT Inc., advocated for state legislation in Connecticut that would have increased housing rights for people with criminal records. The bill never made it to the floor.

Guzman works to help men exiting prison find employment. She has clients sleeping in alleys, elevators, and in one case a dumpster. Another was staying in a homeless shelter when he got a third-shift job. The 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. hours would require him to violate the shelter’s curfew, which would get him thrown out. He chose the job over the bed.

“It’s such a catch-22,” she said. It’s hard to get housing if you don’t have a job; and hard to get a job if you don’t have housing, she explained. Getting either is difficult for someone with a criminal record. Guzman’s own felony conviction led to her family, which includes a husband and stepchildren, being told to leave their apartment. The stigma that goes along with a criminal record can be hard to shake, she said.

“People that turn people away for employment or turn people away for housing, they don’t realize they’re actually contributing to the recidivism rate,” she said. “They are making society a lot less safe.”

Stigma renders both people who have been incarcerated and people who are unhoused easy targets. Rabinowitz thinks that the administration is criminalizing homelessness “in the service of authoritarianism.” In other words, the federal government is carving out a right to lock up people who have not committed a crime. “We also know that fascism is operationalized by testing out policies on groups of people that are believed to have little public sympathy,” he said. “In America, that includes folks who live outside.”

[Colleen Shaddox is a writer and co-author, with Joanne Goldblum, of ‘Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty.’]

Read the original article at Prospect.org.

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