
What Does Trump's Crackdown on Homelessness Mean?
8/20/2025 | 2mVideo has Closed Captions
Late-July order backs encampment crackdowns, ends harm reduction funding.
President Trump’s late-July order pushes cities to clear encampments and seeks to end federal support for Housing First and harm reduction. It prioritizes institutionalization and more mental health and drug courts, would require treatment for federal housing participants, and follows last year’s ruling allowing camping bans.
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SoCal Matters is a local public television program presented by PBS SoCal

What Does Trump's Crackdown on Homelessness Mean?
8/20/2025 | 2mVideo has Closed Captions
President Trump’s late-July order pushes cities to clear encampments and seeks to end federal support for Housing First and harm reduction. It prioritizes institutionalization and more mental health and drug courts, would require treatment for federal housing participants, and follows last year’s ruling allowing camping bans.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipIt's rare for Trump and Newsom, typically adversaries, to see eye to eye on anything.
When the president signed an executive order late July pushing cities and states to use law enforcement to get unhoused people off the street, some of it read like deja vu to Californians.
Newsom already was pressuring cities to crack down on homeless encampments long before Trump's executive order.
Trump doesn't want to stop at banning homeless encampments and pushing people into treatment, and that's where he and Newsom diverge.
The president wants to upend two core tenets of California's homelessness policy.
Trump wants to abolish federal support for Housing First, which is the idea that homeless individuals should get housing even if they are still using drugs, and harm reduction, which focuses on preventing overdoses and otherwise making drug use safer.
Both tenets are backed by research and have been the gold standard in California and at the federal level for years.
The order comes a year after the US Supreme Court removed protections for people living on the streets in California and other western states, ruling cities can ban camping even if they have no shelter beds available.
Trump's order prioritizes committing more people to institutions from the street.
It also promises to prioritize funding to expand mental health courts and drug courts.
Newsom, too, has made it a priority to get people living with mental illness and addiction out of encampments and into treatment without their consent if necessary.
His CARE Court program, which went live in all 58 counties at the end of last year, allows judges to put people into mental health and addiction treatment plans, but it stopped short of allowing judges to force compliance.
Trump, on the other hand, wants people in federal housing programs to have to submit to substance abuse treatment or mental health services as a condition of participation.
His order also stops federal funding for harm reduction.
For CalMatters, I'm Marisa Kendall.

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SoCal Matters is a local public television program presented by PBS SoCal