In January, Louisiana state troopers, alongside other state agencies, swept homeless encampments in downtown New Orleans and bused over 100 people to an industrial warehouse away from the city center in an effort to hide the city's homelessness crisis from Super Bowl tourists.
The Louisiana governor's office told the Associated Press that people weren't forced to go to the center, but had to leave their encampment or could be arrested. But an unhoused person named Christopher Aylwen said in an affidavit that he was threatened with arrest if he didn't agree to go. He left the warehouse after seeing its conditions.
The "transitional center," as the governor's office calls it, initially had no heating, although it had 200 beds and offered residents three meals a day. A city council staffer described it as unfit for human habitation, according to the Guardian.
Advocates for people experiencing homelessness are concerned that these tactics might be a sign of things to come under President Donald Trump and Scott Turner, the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD is the federal body that funds homelessness services and public housing and regulates federally subsidized housing. The agency is generally not involved with enforcing anti-camping laws, but can use its large funding streams as leverage to push for new policies, Next City explains.
There is no evidence yet that the Trump administration plans to use federal resources to create facilities like the one used in New Orleans before the Super Bowl. That facility was managed by the Workforce Group, a private contractor that handles disaster recovery and has connections to Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry. The operation cost Louisiana taxpayers $17.5 million for 90 days, with the firm paying its employees far more than comparable jobs in local government would pay.
For now, it seems like the biggest risk of the Trump administration would be incentivizing blanket camping bans in states and cities and coercing people into state-owned and privately managed encampments or warehouses with strict rules. This is not a far-off fear, as it's essentially the framework many Republican and Democratic leaders have been trying out over the past few years. The difference is that local leaders who were hesitant to push for criminalization may now claim that they have no choice.
Vague threats from Turner and Trump
Before his confirmation as HUD Secretary, Turner declined to say whether he would "support the creation of relocation camps for Americans who are homeless" in response to a questionnaire from Sen. Tina Smith. Instead, Turner cited the record-high numbers of homelessness in HUD's 2024 Point in Time count.
He also took aim at the evidence-based "Housing First" model, saying, "it's clear to me our current approach to addressing homelessness is badly broken." Turner's comments on Housing First match those of the conservatives who have attacked the approach in recent years. That includes the Cicero Institute, which has lobbied for criminalization of homelessness in various states. Cicero founder Joe Lonsdale is a longtime associate of Elon Musk and a patron of Vice President JD Vance, and Cicero has spoken highly of Musk's DOGE task force.
In a statement released prior to Turner's confirmation vote, the National Homelessness Law Center said, "Turner's failure to immediately reject the idea of government-run detention camps is proof that he does not meet the minimum requirements for this job." Turner's response comes after a Trump campaign promise, posted to his website in 2023, to "work with states to ban urban camping" and open up "large parcels of inexpensive land, bring in doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, and drug rehab specialists, and create tent cities."
"It's terrifying for a HUD secretary to refuse to condemn the use of detention camps for people experiencing homelessness, and that that wasn't a deal breaker for enough senators to confirm him," said Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center.
While the rhetoric about tent cities remains vague, the plans seem to build on what has already been tried in West Coast cities over the past four years under Democratic leaders. Cities like San Francisco and Portland have opened sanctioned homeless encampments—enclosures which have strict security and may have stringent rules and curfews—while simultaneously enforcing strict camping bans in other parts of their cities.
These may not exactly be the "detention camps" that Turner was asked about, as residents are theoretically free to leave. But by restricting the space where unhoused people can legally exist outside and potentially decreasing funding for public housing and subsidized housing, people who cannot afford rent have effectively been coerced into living in government-sanctioned spaces with strict rules.
These types of arrangements are enabled by the Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass, which was itself spurred on by Republican and Democratic leaders who petitioned the court. The decision allows local governments to sweep homeless encampments even if there is no available shelter for people to enter.
Advocates for unhoused people are concerned that the Trump administration could go much further than merely coercing people into carceral situations, fearing it would try to detain unhoused people indefinitely, despite legal issues that would arise.
The federal government's power to detain American citizens who are not stably housed should not be different than its ability to detain people who are housed, but many cities and states have laws on the books that criminalize homelessness, including laws against public camping or sleeping in vehicles overnight, laws against storing private property in public spaces and various nuisance laws. In February, Fremont, California, passed a camping ban that criminalizes assisting someone living outdoors.
The federal government could provide resources to state and local governments to enforce such laws. And while it would likely be unlawful, an executive order attempting to implement a camping ban, either directly or through restricting funds, seems to match the administration's current playbook.
"What is this going to look like? We don't know, but I think that we have to accept them at their word," says Rabinowitz. "Maybe they use federal law enforcement, maybe they use the military, maybe they collaborate with state governments that already have statewide camping bans. We're just not sure."
Turner's attack on evidence-based Housing First approaches have also caused alarm. The approach states that permanent, stable housing is the first prerequisite for resolving other issues, and which encourages barrier-free programs that allow pets and do not penalize people for having mental health or substance abuse issues. This has been HUD's stated approach since the George W. Bush administration, although advocates say funding for Housing First programs has always remained far below the need.
HUD's power of the purse
Turner, in his questionnaire response, acknowledged that it would require an act of Congress to implement a nationwide camping ban. No such bill has been introduced. But the chief way that the Trump administration could expand carceral approaches to homelessness is by restricting HUD funding, which would incentivize states and cities to criminalize homelessness.
The Biden administration took the inverse approach: It tried to use HUD funding to incentivize local governments to develop non-carceral plans to address homelessness. It's unclear if this approach had a significant effect on the spread of camping bans, which proliferated during the Biden years. A more blunt approach from the Trump administration in the opposite direction could make a difference, particularly if it incentivizes governments to take actions that electeds already wanted to enact.
The Trump administration has already held up an undetermined amount of federal funding in a blanket funding freeze that impacted nearly every agency. A federal judge blocked the funding freeze, but the administration has defied the order and continued to restrict funding to some initiatives. Several public housing authorities, the local agencies that administer HUD funds and operate public housing, had lost access to funds in January when an initial funding freeze memo was issued.
Advocates who spoke to Next City/Shelterforce said providers were still having trouble accessing some HUD funding as of February, including money for survivors of intimate partner violence.
Involuntary commitment
One way advocates fear that the Trump administration could increase its carceral capacity is by incentivizing the expansion of existing laws that allow people to be involuntarily committed to psychiatric institutions for mental health issues.
Some large cities are already taking such actions: In New York City, for instance, Mayor Eric Adams increased the NYPD's ability to conduct psychiatric hospitalizations, something that Gov. Kathy Hochul also wants to expand. In January, Hochul's office said that she wants to update the state's Mental Hygiene Law to expand involuntary commitment when people are at risk of harm "due to their inability to meet basic needs like food, shelter, or medical care." The proposed expansion would essentially be a blanket tool that could allow for the forced commitment of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness into psychiatric facilities, which Hochul also wants to expand.
In 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom launched "CARE Courts," which allow family members, behavioral health providers, and other approved people to petition for treatment of a person with schizophrenia, and make it easier to establish a conservatorship if a year of court-ordered treatment does not work. The conservative Cicero Institute, which has been pushing for anti-homeless policy across the country, is pushing to make it easier to involuntarily hospitalize unhoused people in its model legislation.
Trump has also supported expansions in psychiatric hospitalization. But the overarching framework of using hospitalization to resolve homelessness is misguided at best, particularly since the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness are not experiencing serious mental illness.
"They have coupled homelessness [with] mental health [and] with substance abuse, and they think that they are preparing to make the case that says homelessness is a choice," Rabinowitz says.
"They're certainly not funding voluntary inpatient mental health services that folks would want to go to. They're cutting funding for healthcare. So I don't think the actual solutions are on the table for these people."
This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice.
