(WASHINGTON, D.C – July 24th, 2025)

Everybody needs a safe place to live. Across America, sky-high rents are both the leading cause of homelessness and a primary cause of financial stress for most families.  Instead of helping people who are struggling to make ends meet, Donald Trump remains focused on backwards, expensive, and ineffective policies that make homelessness worse. The National Homelessness Law Center strongly condemns today’s executive order, which deprives people of their basic rights and makes it harder to solve homelessness. This Executive Order is rooted in outdated, racist myths about homelessness and will undoubtedly make homelessness worse.  

Specifically, this order: 

1. Expands the use of police and institutionalization to respond to homelessness 
2. Prioritizes funding for states that treat homelessness as a crime and end housing-based solutions  
3. Cuts off funding for life-saving programs like harm-reduction.  

Today’s executive order, combined with MAGA’s budget cuts for housing and healthcare, will increase the number of people forced to live in tents, in their cars, and on the streets. This order does nothing to lower the cost of housing or help people make ends meet. The safest communities are those with the most housing and resources, not those that make it a crime to be poor or sick. Forced treatment is unethical, ineffective, and illegal. People need stable housing and access to healthcare. Rather, Trump’s actions will force more people into homelessness, divert taxpayer money away from people in need, and make it harder for local communities to solve homelessness.  

Sadly, but not surprisingly, Trump continues to focus on deeply unpopular policies like handcuffs and jail, which hurt Black and Brown people most. Laws and budgets that make homelessness and poverty worse negatively impact us all. To build truly safe, healthy, and just communities, we need housing and healthcare, not handcuffs and budget cuts. 

This executive order comes amidst a massive influx of laws that make it a crime to be homeless and echo Trump’s earlier misinformed statements, including his desire to force homeless people into government-run detention camps. In response to the increase in anti-homeless laws, Congress recently introduced the Housing Not Handcuffs Act. Similar legislation has been introduced in over a dozen states.  

Please know that the National Homelessness Law Center will use every tool at our disposal to fight back against the growing movement to make it a crime to be homeless and poor in America. Please join our growing movement to fight for Housing Not Handcuffs and demand that Congress pass the Housing Not Handcuffs Act. 

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About the National Homelessness Law Center   

The National Homelessness Law Center is committed to protecting the rights of unhoused people across the United States and to advocating for policies that prevent and end homelessness, ensuring that all people have access to safe and adequate housing.