Yesterday, to little fanfare, the police state metastasized. The media covered Trump’s executive order as a response to homelessness. Few explained the larger context: this is the legal basis to arrest and indefinitely detain any American citizen.
Here is the first full sentence of that order [1]:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.
That sounds more like Trump’s description of BLM protests in Portland, or ICE resistance in liberal cities, than it does a depiction of our all-too-real homelessness epidemic.
The order goes on to instruct agencies to dismantle progressive, research-based responses to homelessness, substance addiction and mental illness. A punitive anti-science response is hardly surprising for this regime, but don’t think for a moment they care—even poorly—about homeless veterans or opioid addiction.
They care about control.
July 4th we saw the funding for a massive police state drop into place. The BBBudget makes ICE larger than all but a few national militaries. [2] It was never about immigration.
That budget provides 45 Billion dollars for concentration camps. That’s a lot of people.
Fascist regimes start with controversial steps against unpopular groups because it weakens resistance. I’m going to explain why this order threatens you, but I want to be clear: you should also oppose it because it’s the wrong answer to real social issues. Research says that treating homelessness first, and then addressing addiction and mental health from a harm reduction approach, works best. [6] This order strips those programs. It’s not about helping vulnerable citizens.
Instead, it establishes the legal basis for a growing police state to demand your papers and detain you indefinitely on vague government-defined criteria.
That isn’t hyperbole.
One of the strongest protections you have is your right not to be detained or forced to produce identification without cause. When we say “papers please” in our best Nazi accent, we are referencing the alternative: a nation where you must prove you are an upstanding citizen on demand, or disappear.
This order establishes that inversion in Section 3: Fighting Vagrancy on America’s Streets. Vagrancy is a vague legal term historically used to evade “reasonable suspicion” laws. Instead of police demonstrating a reason to stop you, you need to prove you aren’t a vagrant. Your papers are only the first requirement—vagrancy laws enforced racial segregation, criminalized “chronic” public speech, and punished refusal to work. It’s a slop-term for authoritarian control, and its inclusion should chill anyone familiar with fascism, civil rights history, or other oppressive regimes. [3] [4]
They want more than the right to stop you anywhere, anytime, to prove you aren’t a neer-do-well, though. That’s where criminalizing mental illness delivers!
They want to lock you up indefinitely too. Not all of you—just anyone who doesn’t spitshine fascist boots with sufficient alacrity. They aren’t being coy either: RFK Jr. advocates for work camps for “lifestyle” diseases. He means all mental health conditions and many physical diseases like diabetes. Trump put him in charge of a commission to look into the “threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), antipsychotics (and) mood stabilizers.” [5]
Maybe you’ve never had a day of depression in your life. They haven’t forgotten you! Legislation to “research Trump Derangement Syndrome” was introduced to Congress last term, normalizing the idea that resisting this regime is, prima facie, evidence of mental illness. Like everything else they do, this isn’t original. Early feminists were lobotomized for their self-evident social deviance.
It’s a scary scenario, but we knew it was coming. From the day they began detaining documented immigrants, we knew this was the goal. When they passed the BBBudget, we knew why it was so big. This is a major escalation, but it’s also an expected one, so let’s talk about next steps.
They’re going to start with populations even the left struggles to agree about.
They’ll round up the people you look away from on the street, so stop looking away. See the people who don’t get to shower on sweltering summer days. Buy a coffee or hand them some cash. Don’t worry about how they’ll spend it—first we help. [6]
I’d guess mental health roundups will start with transgender people. For years we’ve forced transgender people to establish mental distress as a prerequisite to medical transition. Most will therefore have mental health records, and admit it—some of you are a little ambivalent, right?
Easier to look away from uncomfortable questions and people.
Once they’ve established that homeless people in tents and transgender people who once considered suicide can be forced into government run camps, they can come for anyone they want.
So we push back hard, now. The first step is to make this a topic of widespread conversation and refuse to let go of it. Remember how we had nonstop stories about the flight to El Salvador, and we learned Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s name, and then stories of all the disappeared began circulating?
We do that again: everyone needs to be talking about this.
We also need to organize. A lot of the practical implementation will come down to local decisions and internal sand in the gears. Medical professionals needs to talk about protecting patients and records. We all need to attend city council meetings and vote in Sheriff’s elections. If you have old counseling notes or medical records ask if they can be destroyed. Scan your life, and your community, for ways to slow down the transmission of records that could be used to target people under these laws. Publicize the stories of brutal work conditions at protests outside every ICE hiring event. If you haven’t before, study safe protest protocols, and then refuse to comply in advance. Get out there and be loud for as long as you can. Study the history of vagrancy laws, the research on addiction and homelessness, and how fascists divide us. Read every footnoted link on this article. Learn the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp, and admit this awful truth: America did this before, to our Japanese citizens. It can’t just happen here: it already has.
We can look to the model of resistance used to push back against immigrant rendition: visibility, protest, community resistance, organizing and mutual defense each play a role. We’ve won a number of fights—none of them perfectly—and regime popularity is underwater on every measure. We fight hard to make this cost them dearly. We make them fight for every inch they steal, and we fight for everyone because they are a human being, deserving of dignity.
We hold the line.
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-ice-bill-trump-2093456
[3] https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-criminalize-homelessness
[4] https://time.com/4199924/vagrancy-law-history/
[5] https://www.newsweek.com/rfk-jr-antidepressants-ssris-drugs-maha-2032297
[6] https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/Housing-First-Evidence.pdf
ACLU statement: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-condemns-trump-executive-order-targeting-disabled-and-unhoused-people
Source of image: https://candlesholocaustmuseum.org/file_download/inline/a2277a2e-2ed7-47db-a1ae-fd70a4f9c249
God, this so grim.
Twist this were available on major media!!! Well covered.