(WASHINGTON, D.C – November 14th, 2025)

Today, instead of using their power to help people pay rent, access healthcare, or lower the cost of groceries, the Trump administration doubled down on backwards polices that will make homelessness worse. These changes will force 170,000 people- mostly seniors and people with disabilities- who are currently stably housed, back into homelessness. Instead of helping people, HUD's ideologically driven funding guidelines leverage nearly $4 billion to play political games that will:  

• Restrict funding from cities that refuse to treat homelessness as a crime
• Impose ideological mandates on states to attack trans people and immigrants
• Deny funding to jurisdictions that recognize the common sense and data-backed truth that housing and support solve homelessness.  

"Let us be clear: Donald Trump's approach to homelessness does nothing to address the sky-high cost of rent, which remains the main cause of homelessness.  Instead, his reckless actions are cruel and backward and will force even more people to sleep outside," said Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center. He continued, "Trump's approach towards homelessness will worsen the lives of most people, waste taxpayer money, and instead direct taxpayer dollars towards debunked, disproven, and failed approaches to homelessness. Like many of his policies, Trump's attacks on homeless people will hurt us all, but will do extra harm to Black, brown, migrant, disabled, queer, and transgender communities." 

"It doesn't have to be this way," Rabinowitz added. "We need real leaders to focus on proven solutions to homelessness: housing and support. Together, we can ensure that everybody—regardless of what they look like, where they are from, or what they do—has a safe place to call home."   

Trump's attacks on homeless people are not new. He has long talked of forcing people who can't pay rent into government-run detention camps. HUD Secretary Scott Turner, during his Senate nomination, failed to reject the idea of forcing homeless people into detention camps. And now, Turner's agency just released a funding plan that makes Utah's heinous plan to create the largest government-run homeless detention camp in the country easier. This shameful approach, driven by Trump's anti-homeless edict, will include over 800 involuntary beds, the likelihood of forced labor, and will be funded in part by defunding proven housing programs to fund a jail-like camp. We've seen this before. At no time in history has forcing people into a camp been acceptable, and this time is no different.  

It's long past time for us all to stand together in rejecting the growing attacks on people who sleep outside and to double down on real solutions, such as housing and support. As Trump uses homelessness as justification to take over cities and deploy the military, we demand that Congress pass the Housing Not Handcuffs Act, designed to prohibit federal agencies from arresting, ticketing, or otherwise criminalizing homelessness.