CREDIT: Johnny Silvercloud
By the League National Housing and Homelessness Committee
Washington D.C., August 12, 2025: “Yesterday, I walked from the White House through the National Mall… The streets are eerily empty for an August afternoon near the storied monuments. In some places, there are more ICE, DEA, ARNG, and FBI personnel than there are regular people. There are fire trucks blocking lanes of traffic for no reason. There are Humvees sitting outside of Union Station for no reason other than to terrorize people–to let us know that we are being watched…” — Facebook post, Mia Michelle McClain
The Trump administration occupation of Washington D.C. police is a vicious, fascist attack on working-class families. It is a betrayal of democracy and a violation of equal protection by singling out African American-led and so-called sanctuary cities for attack. It threatens every resident of low-income housing with its brutal call to “get rid of the slums” without regard to the people to live there. And finally, the order to fine or jail any homeless resident who fails to leave the city or enter a shelter (when there are literally no beds available) is an all-out assault on the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Resistance began immediately. In Washington, mutual-aid groups like Miriam’s Kitchen sprang into action, assisting unhoused encampment residents during city sweeps, and struggling to open new shelters and safeguard people from arrest. Free DC, a community organization originally formed to protest abuses by Biden, immediately organized resistance to Trump. It led nightly pot-banging demonstrations, morning and afternoon school support teams to protect vulnerable students, and an Adopt a Curfew Zone to protect youth targeted by Trump-directed police.
Billionaire class strategy is clearly to “divide and conquer” and strip working class people of their rights, one section at a time. Many are already aware that this is happening with the mass deportations of migrants and mass incarceration, especially of African Americans and Latinos. Not as many understand that the Trump attacks on unhoused people are a calculated campaign against the right to housing for all low-wealth workers.
KEEPING HOUSED AND UNHOUSED APART
Trump’s July 24 executive order on homelessness is based on the lie that the problem is one of “crime and disorder on America’s streets.” It deliberately refuses to mention the real cause of homelessness – unaffordable rents – and it openly calls for cancelation of the Housing First program that moves people into permanent housing. Instead of ending homelessness and reducing rents by allocating more money, the administration has called for massive cuts to existing Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner is calling out unhoused people for their “cycle of dependency,” as if the great majority of them have not worked hard for most of their lives. As if America’s shortage of 7.1 million extremely low-income homes doesn’t even exist. As if people are lazy because they can’t work the 116 hours a week that minimum wage employees would need, to be able to afford typical rents.
Deliberately separating the homelessness and housing issues faithfully serves the “real estate industrial complex,” which has sabotaged government affordable housing policy for over a century, to prevent competition and preserve its exorbitant rents. At the same time, it is a conscious ruling-class ploy to drive a wedge between the unhoused and those still struggling to make rent or mortgage payments. Rent is nothing more or less than a tribute paid by the lowest-income workers, mainly to people with generational wealth (if not billionaire corporations). The plan is to divide the housing movement with vicious lies and innuendos, to turn people’s well-grounded fears that homelessness could happen to them into a visceral hatred of the unhoused themselves.
The Trump call for “getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces” and forcing unhoused people to “move out IMMEDIATELY …. FAR from the Capital” is reminiscent of Nazi “beautification” programs. So-called “Asocials” were sent to concentration camps where they were starved and worked to death. By stigmatizing the unhoused, they terrorize the hundreds of millions of other Americans who are at risk of homelessness and discourage them from uniting in the common struggle against the dictatorship.
“So what are you going to do – criminalize the homeless?” asked one resident as he was being swept out of an encampment in San Jose, California. “If you can work together to lock everybody up, why can’t you do it to get people into housing? All across the country, the way they’re dealing with encampments and homeless people is all the same. Think about what they’re doing in Gaza. Where’s the difference? … Even if you give them something for a year, or six months, what have you done to change that situation, that they’re going to get back into again? … I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff happen out here and I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things happen out here, people helping out, people going out of their way to do things. So I know that we can solve the problem.”
COMMON HUMANITY, COMMON THREATS
It is time to go onto the offensive by uniting unhoused people with tenants and the entire larger movement for housing. As America’s 45 million tenant households get organized to resist their own displacement, they can begin to understand that unhoused people are their allies, not their enemies. They can create the power to influence neighborhood and community organizations and thwart fascist plans to isolate and incarcerate unhoused people.
Elevating our common humanity and morality is a revolutionary act. One D.C. minister held up a sign that said, “What does it profit us to gain the whole world if we lose our soul?” Workers unite when they begin to understand that hatred and division is not only wrong and destructive, but unnecessary. America is the richest country in the world, and has many times more than enough wealth to house its people, if only it can be freed from the grip of the billionaire system.
