Trump’s Executive Order Criminalizing Houselessness Reveals a Familiar Dystopia

Americans love a Victorian asylum. As paranormal entertainment, they offer thrill-seeking with the assumption that the days are long gone when almost anyone could have you committed for almost any reason, often for life.

Yet for decades, academics, pundits, and politicians across the political spectrum have been openly calling for a return to the asylum. Now, a new executive order signed by Trump on June 24, 2025, proposes that states use civil commitment laws to disappear unhoused people, mad and disabled people, and (some) people who use drugs into long-term congregate institutions and coercive programs. Welcome back to the asylum.

Deploying a punitive approach to houselessness, substance use, and psychiatric disability, the executive order, aptly titled “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS,” paints a familiar picture of dangerous and undesirable vagrants that must be purged from society and forcibly cured for the sake of order. It reproduces a long-perpetrated false narrative that the root causes of houselessness are “serious mental illness and addiction,” rather than skyrocketing housing costs. The executive order ends federal support for harm reduction programs and the Housing First model, instead incentivizing states and localities to adopt or expand the law-and-order approach. It would also allow police to access the protected health data of unhoused people, contributing to the growth of carceral AI beyond its already expansive reach on disabled and mad people and their caregivers.

While the publication of the executive order has led to panicked coverage in the media and online, mad, disabled, and unhoused people have been sounding the alarm for years. “Disabled people have been telling you that the weaponization of disability against you was coming,” said disability advocate Imani Barbarin in a post calling out the overwrought reactions of those who have previously been largely silent on the ongoing scapegoating, abandonment, confinement, and social murder of people with psychiatric and other disabilities.

The Dystopia Has Always Been Here

Online, this executive order has already been compared to the earliest chapters of the Nazi Holocaust, with some commentators drawing parallels to the “Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich,” or Operation Work-Shy, which began in 1938 and targeted “anti-social elements” including alcoholics, the unemployed, and vagrants, among many other categories. This operation preceded Aktion T4, the Nazi euthanasia program that in 1939 ushered in the holocaust with the mass murder of disabled people.

Public health educator Azrael Mae Ní Mháille, who is active in PWUD organizing (harm reduction activism led by people who use drugs), posted on July 25, 2025, in response to the executive order, saying: “Calls for a return of the violently ableist asylum system, or the continued restrengthening of the deeply racist post-emancipation anti-vagrancy laws, stop just short of calling for a return to legalized chattel slavery, or for a new Aktion T4.”

In the U.S., the birthplace of the eugenics movement that inspired Adolf Hitler, the rounding up and confinement of “undesirables” in asylums, institutions, and detention centers is what scholar Jess Whatcott terms carceral eugenics.

While the historical parallels are chilling, we need not look that far back. Efforts to bring the asylum into the community have been underway in the U.S. since the late 1990s, in the form of states’ involuntary outpatient commitment laws. These laws create civil courts that mandate treatment, with the threat of psychiatric incarceration for noncompliance with orders.

The provisions in the new executive order will be familiar to anyone tracking “anti-camping” legislation that has emerged in a number of states and over 100 cities over the last several years, with an involuntary psychiatric intervention component. At the forefront of these efforts is the Koch-funded Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank led by venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir along with Peter Thiel.

Regressive measures like California’s Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment (CARE) Act signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022 enacted the CARE Court system, which compels people with psychiatric disabilities into treatment, and as Disability Rights California noted, creates a “new pathway to conservatorship.”

In New York, Mayor Eric Adams’ involuntary removals policy promotes similar approaches that disappear people with mental health differences from public and private spaces under the guise of treatment.

And little over a year ago, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson further criminalized houselessness, giving cities the go-ahead to fine, ticket, and detain unhoused neighbors even when no shelter is available.

The executive order’s dystopic vision has always been here, driven by “carceral sanism” and “racial criminal pathologization” — language that Liat Ben-Moshe, one of the authors of this piece, coined to describe the varied ways in which the state pathologizes madness, disability, race, and class to justify disappearing and mandating people into prisons, psychiatric facilities, and other coercive systems that are simultaneously branded as care and public safety.

With housing and health care still considered privileges for the deserving and not rights in the United States, the scapegoating of disabled and unhoused people continues.

The various bans on sleeping outside have been described as a war on the unhoused, reminiscent of past wars on drugs and the war on poverty. They are about building out racial criminal pathologization infrastructure, alongside other forms of capture and confinement (the prison-industrial complex, ICE, and immigration detention).

It’s therefore important to consider the executive order alongside the budget reconciliation megabill that became law on July 4, 2025. This legislation advances a death-making necropolitics that is distinctly all-American. The megabill’s eugenicist provisions include $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid that will strip 17 million Americans of health insurance and food assistance, leading to hunger, disablement, chronic illness, and preventable death. Hand in hand, it includes unprecedented funding for state-sponsored violence over the next four years: $75 billion for ICE and $150 billion for the military — the largest defense budget in U.S. history. Then there are the billions annually that successive administrations have pumped into the Israeli military machine to enable occupation, apartheid, and mass disablement and genocide in Palestine.

With public dollars pouring into the hands of the billionaires and the jaws of the military, police, and surveillance states, and with housing and health care still considered privileges for the deserving and not rights in the United States, the scapegoating of disabled and unhoused people continues.

Putting the Executive Order Into Perspective

This executive order deploys well-worn fascist tactics designed to instill fear and confusion into the populace. Critically, such orders only apply to the actions of the federal government. While the feds can give or withhold resources to incentivize states to follow certain carceral federal policies, many states are already pushing back on these new orders.

We can look to history for parallel horrors, but we can also find analogues for resistance. Prior to the early 1970s, most folks could be put away in an institution for life with virtually no due process. Deinstitutionalization was the outcome of decades of multi-faceted organizing and analysis by mad and disabled people and movements, and the activist parents, attorneys and policymakers connected to them. They successfully pushed through reforms that fundamentally altered a century of mental health policy, granting disabled people legal protections from arbitrary confinement. For now, the federal government cannot simply erase these momentous achievements, censor the lessons learned from closing down asylums, or eliminate states’ existing civil commitment laws and standards, eroding as they may be, at the stroke of a pen.

Prior to the early 1970s, most folks could be put away in an institution for life with virtually no due process.

Despite the well-worn argument that deinstitutionalization, or the closure of large institutions beginning in the mid-1950s in America and continuing through the 1980s, was a colossal failure, abandoning people in the streets and in prisons, it is important to remind that it was one of the largest decarceration movements in U.S. history — a success of activism, not its failure. Rather, a well-organized campaign of political haranguing and media narratives steeped in neoliberal racism has driven policies and priorities over decades that scapegoated this activism against criminal racial pathologization and have culminated in the present moment.

Time will tell how the ongoing dystopia unfolds. Will venture capitalists and private equity firms snake into “cradle to grave” services, as they have already done with other forms of carceral sanism and the prison industry? For example, GEO Care, the subsidiary of the for profit prison company GEO Group, already operates residential psychiatric treatment hospitals in such states as Florida, South Carolina, and Texas. Alternatively, perhaps billions will be extracted from taxpayers and spent on programs that provide no housing and little discernable on-the-ground impact, as with Newsom’s CARE Court — enacting the true “waste, fraud, and abuse” (as opposed to the false claims of waste, fraud, and abuse that Trump has been circulating).

Resistance Has Also Always Been Here

When a war is declared, it is not only about the money but the dispersal of weapons and the creation of scapegoat targets. This is why it is vital to heed what activists in the housing justice, mad justice, disability justice, abolitionist, and harm reduction movements have to say about this new executive order, and what this means for our movements now.

“We are not helpless to prevent the worst of this,” wrote Ní Mháille. “In spite of the many who will willingly collaborate, there are those of us who will resist what is coming at the cost of our salaries, our reputations, our freedom, and our safety. We have seen what this leads to. We must refuse to be collaborative, compliant, nor complacent.”

Mad and disabled organizers have long been building and preparing for times like these, showing us how to build and deepen diffuse networks of collective care. One such organization is Project LETS, which is dedicated to creating “just, responsive, and transformative peer support collectives and community mental health care structures that do not depend on state-sanctioned systems that trap our folks in the medical/prison-industrial complex.” We the Unhoused, a podcast hosted by Theo Henderson, has tracked rising criminalization in Los Angeles and beyond for years, uplifting needed insights from unhoused and disabled organizers.

With or without executive orders, mutual aid, harm reduction, and abolition efforts continue on the ground as they always have.

Note: For further insights and analysis of the executive order, as well as ideas on what communities can do now, we urge readers to turn to the Quick Guide to Trump’s New Executive Order by @neuroabolition and @projectlets.