What’s Inside Trump’s New Executive Order on Homelessness

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, in the United States where more than 770,000 people experienced homelessness in one single night in 2024, Hari Sreenivasan of us and speaks to Donald Whitehead Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, who’s experienced this struggle firsthand.

 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Donald Whitehead, thanks so much for joining us. President Trump recently laid out an executive order about homelessness. What’s it about?

 

DONALD WHITEHEAD: It, it, it, it covers a number of things, all very horrifying. It encourages cities to enforce, enforce forced institutionalization in mental health institutions and jails. And, we think maybe even detention camps. And forcing people into substance abuse treatment. It also discourages some of the programs that we have seen have best outcomes. They are best practices. Those programs are discouraged. And funding will be taken away if people use things like harm reduction, or if they don’t criminalize people.

 

SREENIVASAN:  In there, it says, “Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor any other citizens. My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.” Is public safety a problem because of an increase in the homeless population?

 

WHITEHEAD: The safety is really people experiencing homelessness who are more likely — and people with mental health issues — who are far more likely to be victimized than any member of the public. And furthermore, I would say that this particular executive order doesn’t do anything to solve homelessness. If you incarcerate people, if you use involuntary placement in mental institutions, it does not solve homelessness. What solves homelessness is housing supportive services, healthcare and jobs that pay livable wages.

 

SREENIVASAN: So, there’s a couple of different layers I want to unpack here. When you look at the surveys over time isn’t homelessness on the rise?

 

WHITEHEAD: Sure. Homelessness is on the rise, but it’s on the rise for reasons other than anything related to criminalization. Homelessness is on the rise because housing costs are on the rise. So there’s a direct correlation between the rise in housing costs across the country, and the number of people who are experiencing homelessness. We see a rise in the number of people 55 and older experiencing homelessness. We’ve also seen a rise in these kind of practices that criminalize. And, what I mean by criminalize is they jail, they ticket, and they fine people experiencing homelessness, which actually increases the likelihood that they won’t be able to get out of homelessness. 

So I believe that the criminalization — we, we’ve seen 320 new cities institute laws that would criminalize homeless people since the dreadful Supreme Court decision last year that said, even though nowhere in this country there’s enough shelter or enough housing for people experiencing homelessness, cities are able to institute these measures that criminalize people experiencing homelessness.

 

SREENIVASAN: So, we saw that in part as a reaction to the encampments that were happening in cities like, say, Portland, Oregon or Los Angeles, et cetera, and that there are now cities who wanna prevent that from happening in their own backyard, right? 

Now, I wonder, at the same time, when you look at the perception of reality, the public opinion polls, you see an increasing number of people saying that homelessness is a problem. Is that because of how these stories, for example, come out on the news or on YouTube, et cetera? Or is there something else?

 

WHITEHEAD: Well, I think public perception is actually guided by misinformation. So we’ve done our own internal polling and we’ve worked with other groups that are in the homeless sector. And what we find is that 70% of the people do think that there is an issue with homelessness, but they don’t believe that you should fine, arrest, or jail people. Again, that does not solve homelessness. What we need to solve homelessness is more affordable housing. We need a dramatic influx of housing production in this country if we’re gonna solve homelessness. If you look at reports out of the National Low Income Housing Coalition you’ll see that housing wage in this country is above $20 an hour. Minimum wage is $7 an hour. People can’t keep up with housing under those conditions. 

We don’t think people should be living under bridges and in abandoned buildings and in encampments, especially our elderly population, children, other groups. No one should have to live outside. Everybody should have a decent, safe, and affordable home, but we’re not producing more housing. The president’s budget actually zeroed out housing programs. It actually would cut term limits for housing, so people would only be able to stay in housing for two years. Those are all recipes for a disaster. And so this administration needs to really use evidence-based information and look at the true underlying structural causes of homelessness.

 

SREENIVASAN: So what does the evidence-based information say? What are programs that actually help people not be homeless anymore?

 

WHITEHEAD: Great question. One is the permanent supportive housing program. Now, when researchers have looked at that program, there is a 90% success rate. One of the provisions in this executive order says that people utilizing those kinds of programs — so this is a program where people are taken off the street, they’re put in their housing unit, and they’re provided an array of wraparound services for mental health, for substance abuse. And, this program is designed for people who have been homeless the longest, who have the highest probability of not being able to get out on their own. 

And we know that those services — substance abuse treatment, behavioral health treatment — all of those things are better done for people in a stable unit. It’s really hard to provide those kind of services when someone is sleeping in an outdoor location. That program, again, has a 90% success rate in studies. And so it, it just absolutely boggles the mind to think that that kind of program would be one that this administration has an issue with. 

 

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, you’re saying, for example, the 90% success rate based on the facts that of how these programs work and what’s been measured. But there’s also this perception that, oh, you know what? Providing more services to homeless people or mentally ill people, I mean, this is, this is to some extent their fault. They got themselves into this, and that we collectively should not be trying to give them, you know, assistance after a certain point. What’s wrong with that?

 

WHITEHEAD: Well, a lot of things that are wrong — are wrong with that. In fact we know that behavioral health issues, mental health issues, disability issues, developmental delays are medical issues. People don’t cause themselves to have those kind of issues. Substance abuse is a disease. So, these are not moral failures. Homelessness didn’t increase to the level it is because people failed morally. It increased because we stopped providing mental health services after deinstitutionalization. We stopped providing jobs that pay livable wages in this country. It now cost, again, over $20 an hour if you only pay 30% of your income for housing, to be able to afford the housing long term. These are structural issues. It’s not a personal moral failure that there is an overrepresentation of people of color in the homeless population. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Mmhmm.

 

WHITEHEAD: Most African Americans, people from the Native American community, are severely overrepresented. And it doesn’t correlate with poverty. So we have some deep, deep structural issues that we have to solve if we’re gonna change homelessness. 

And, the last thing I’ll say about that is that the reason we are here is because every other time there’s been four segments of homelessness in our history in this country. Every other time there has been a response from the federal government that lowered those numbers, made those numbers virtually disappear. And I’m talking about new deal programs, Social Security, Medicare. We have not seen that in the last 40 years. This is the longest continuous period of homelessness, and we’ve never provided resources to the level of the problem. 

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, if we see that this problem has been getting worse, is that an indictment on the fact that our policies are not working? I mean, is maybe that’s part of what’s motivating this approach by the administration.

 

WHITEHEAD: So, again, I would say that when we have done things that would be preventative in nature, that prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place, expanded housing production, it has worked. We saw that during COVID. We saw communities move away from congregate shelters with hundreds, maybe thousands of people to smaller individual settings. We saw eviction prevention dollars put in place. We saw emergency housing vouchers. And housing vouchers are one of the best solutions to homelessness. The permanent supportive housing program I talked about is a great program for a portion of the population. It is not a be all and end all. We need much more. We need vouchers. Everybody deserves, again, a safe place to live. 

Another issue that this executive order fails to recognize is the number of children that we see enter this population. Certainly we don’t consider our children in the school system, almost 1.5 million of them, criminals. So there is a need to look at this issue comprehensively. What we’ve been forced to do as a sector is to choose portions of the population, because we were forced to operate in a scarcity model where they picked the population — sometimes it was veterans, sometimes it was the chronically homeless — but we never have gotten to scale with the resources for this issue where it was a comprehensive solution. 

So I agree with you. The policies have been failed. But the policies are not on the part of people experiencing homelessness. They should not be blamed for the growth of homelessness. We have a federal government and elected officials who have never addressed the problem in a comprehensive way. 

 

SREENIVASAN: When you look at the population of homelessness, is the proportion of people with mental illnesses and mental health problems rising? I mean, the numbers in New York, it’s somewhere around 17% and almost a quarter of the population in California. I mean, is the administration right to try and target this population? The President says, “For those who are severely mentally ill and deeply disturbed, we will bring them to mental institutions, where they belong, with the goal of reintegrating them back into society once they are well enough to manage.”

 

WHITEHEAD: Well it is certainly a great need. We do have a proportion, a portion of the population that does suffer from mental illness and many that suffer from severe mental illness. We learned in the fifties, we learned almost 70 years ago that that was not putting large numbers of people into mental institution was a failed policy. That’s how we got to deinstitutionalization. What was a much better solution was smaller community-based facilities where people got to have agency but address their mental health at the same time. 

So what is being proposed is detention camps and putting people in institutions, basically warehousing them. And, there is no housing that’s attached to this. So that’s a very important point here. So if you put people in those institutions, and I’ll repeat this, or you put ’em in a correction facility, one of the largest concentrations of people that have mental health issues is the Los Angeles County Jail, for instance. They don’t have housing when they leave those institutions. 

And so, you haven’t done anything but disappeared people. Made people believe that you, you were doing something to address homelessness, when really you’re hiding the issue. But it does not solve homelessness. It removes people from systems of care that they’ve engaged in that will help towards their eventual escape from homelessness. People are forced into that issue. They want treatment. The treatment’s just not available. 

New York tried to do a forced institutionalization. They found that they were hundreds of thousands of beds less than the need for people that needed that particular intervention. And that would be the same everywhere in this country. We have to do something very different than warehousing people. It does not work. We’ve seen horrific videos, you know, 50 years ago, and we don’t wanna return to that. But we think this is kind of a recipe for us to return to that.

 

SREENIVASAN: Is the executive order constitutional? Is this gonna be challenged in the courts?

 

WHITEHEAD: So,  I think it’ll be challenged in the courts, but I, I, it is crafted in a way that the administration will have a little bit of freedom until they actually start to implement it. So there certainly will be challenges but not immediately because of the way it’s crafted. So we have been in touch with some of the larger legal institutions in the country and those within the homeless sector, and we are crafting a strategy. This won’t go un unaddressed. It, it won’t be — we will provide a legal resistance to this particular order. And, that idea is being shaped now. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Donald, why is this so personal for you? 

 

WHITEHEAD: Part of it is  because I care, about other people. But the other issue is I’ve experienced homelessness myself. And I experienced it twice. I experienced it as a child, and I experienced it as an adult. (20:28): And, and since that time, I’ve been able to save tens of maybe hundreds of thousands of people. I put 200 people that I found on the streets of Prince George’s County, Maryland into units during COVID. 

So, it is very personal. I talk to people experiencing homelessness every day. And I’ll tell you I answer an email box that is, frequently, and, and every day I see more and more people that are really, really concerned. They’re saying, “I’m homeless, and I just heard that I’m gonna be arrested. What should I do?”  Those are the kind of things I’m hearing in our info box. So every one of those stories touches me because of my own personal experience. I know what it’s like to be homeless. I know what it’s like to be harassed while I was on the street. So it really hits home on a personal level, and I am committed to doing everything I can to make sure that we push back against this executive order. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Executive Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, Donald Whitehead, thanks so much for your time.

WHITEHEAD: Well, thank you so much, and I really appreciate you bringing attention to this issue. It is so, so important.