Criminalizing Homelessness Won’t Work
This week, the Trump Administration issued a deeply troubling executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets”—a name that obscures its true intent: targeting and criminalizing people experiencing homelessness.
Instead of addressing the root causes of homelessness—such as unaffordable housing, inadequate mental health care, and systemic inequality—this order blames the victims. It proposes to punish people for being poor, for sleeping outdoors, for living with addiction, and for surviving without stable shelter. And it does so while cutting off funding for the very programs proven to help.
Let’s be clear: criminalizing homelessness doesn’t solve it. Arrests, citations, and forced removals only push people further from stability, compounding trauma and making it harder to access housing, employment, or healthcare. These policies don’t create safer communities—they deepen suffering and perpetuate cycles of poverty and incarceration.
The executive order also takes aim at evidence-based, life-saving strategies like Housing First and harm reduction—approaches backed by years of research and success stories. It threatens to redirect federal funding away from communities using these models, and toward cities that enforce punitive measures against unhoused people and those with substance use disorders.
Worse still, the order seeks to erode the privacy and civil rights of unhoused individuals by sharing personal health information with law enforcement—treating medical and housing needs as matters of criminal surveillance rather than care.
This is a moral failure and a policy disaster.
We need more housing, not more handcuffs. More compassion, not criminalization. What’s required is investment in affordable housing, mental health care, substance use treatment, and community-based supports—not the vilification of those struggling in the margins.
At The Delores Project, we stand firmly with the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and others speaking out against this dangerous order. We will continue to fight for evidence-based, dignity-affirming solutions to homelessness—and for the rights of every person to have a safe place to live, to heal, and to belong.
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