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WHEN SLEEPING IS A CRIME  
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Colleen Shaddox
August 11, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ With a new executive order and model state legislation
criminalizing homelessness, the richest people in the U.S. are making
it easier to lock up the poorest. Today in Washington, DC the order is
out - lock up the unhoused. _

A person sweeps trash near a homeless encampment on a Los Angeles
sidewalk, August 6, 2025., Qian Weizhong/VCG via AP // The American
Prospect

 

Strongbow Lone Eagle, 56, was charged with trespassing on the New
Haven Green, where he had been staying in a tent. Police also took him
in on warrants for failure to register his address as a sex offender.
Lone Eagle literally did not have an address. The green was the very
spot that the state Department of Correction had dropped him off when
he finished serving his sentence, with all of $400 in his pocket. Lone
Eagle called the experience, which included a night in jail,
“mind-boggling.”

He is caught in the homelessness/incarceration cycle, which has gotten
increasingly vicious of late. In its 2024 _Grants Pass_ decision
[[link removed]], the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments may arrest or fine people
for sleeping on public land. Since then, more than 200 municipalities
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passed ordinances against people sleeping outdoors. In
July, President Donald Trump issued an executive order
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criminalizing homelessness and directing federal funding toward
jurisdictions taking punitive approaches to unsheltered people. The
executive order followed closely on the passage of the One Big
Beautiful Bill Act, which included massive cuts
[[link removed]] to
health and nutrition programs for low-income communities. The
administration is also proposing cuts and time limits
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the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8), which provides rental
assistance. It is a perfect storm aimed at people who were already
soaking wet.

The criminalization of homelessness is not new. People who have been
incarcerated are ten times as likely
[[link removed]] to become
unhoused as the general public, according to the Prison Policy
Initiative. Meanwhile, people living unsheltered had an average of 21
interactions with police
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a six-month period, according to a study that the California Policy
Lab conducted in fifteen states.

The old idea of punishing people for being unhoused is getting new,
well-financed backing. The Cicero Institute
[[link removed]] advocates involuntary commitment to
mental health facilities of unhoused people and is critical of
“housing first” approaches that get people off the streets rapidly
with offers of voluntary treatment. The Institute did not respond to
requests for comment.

The think tank provides model legislation to encourage states to
criminalize homelessness. Its literature blames the housing-first
philosophy for the increase in homelessness but does not mention the
rising cost of housing. (A 2022 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts
[[link removed]] quantified
the intuitive lesson: When rents go up, homelessness follows.) The
Cicero Institute’s materials foment fear of unhoused people, whom
they paint as a source of addiction-fueled crime. Trump’s executive
order is titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s
Streets.”

Cicero has promoted criminalization of homelessness bills for two
years running in Indiana, and housing advocates expect to see them
back next session. The bills were defeated in the red state by a
coalition that included hospitals, advocates, and police. “It’s an
additional mandate on law enforcement, just like it is a mandate and a
burden on housing providers and community services and local
governments,” said Andrew Bradley, senior director of policy and
strategy at Prosperity Indiana.

The model legislation promoted by the Cicero Institute directs states
to stop funding housing first and instead fund camps and shelters.

Cicero had better luck in neighboring Kentucky, where punitive
legislation passed and led to police issuing a citation to an
unhoused woman in active labor
[[link removed]].
“Prosperity Indiana has heard from our partners in southern Indiana,
that are literally across the river from Kentucky, that they are
seeing people experiencing homelessness coming across the river to
avoid some of that criminalization,” Bradley said.

Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at the National
Homelessness Law Center, tracked the expansion of the Cicero Institute
in the past decade with “an explosion of anti-homeless laws …
there now literal billionaires with substantive political influence
and a political structure peddling this misinformation across the
country.”

Rabinowitz described the Cicero Institute as “deeply tied to the
Trump administration.” Cicero’s founder is Joe Lonsdale, a venture
capitalist and co-founder of Palantir who is friends with Elon Musk
and business partner with Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a mentor
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Vice President JD Vance. “We know that Joe Lonsdale meets with the
White House,” Rabinowitz said. “So it’s our analysis that the
Cicero Institute is all over this executive order, and the executive
order is one of the worst things to happen to people experiencing
homelessness in decades.”

“Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings
for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment
will restore public order,” the executive order reads. Where
unhoused people will get this forced treatment, and from whom, is
uncertain. Nearly half of the U.S. adults in need of mental health
treatment do not receive it
[[link removed]],
according to the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, in
part because of a severe shortage of providers. That analysis predates
an $11 billion Trump revocation of funding
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states to support mental health and addiction services, and
the trillion-dollar cut to Medicaid
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the largest payer for these services in the U.S, under the Big
Beautiful Bill.

Cicero’s website proclaims that 75 percent of people who are
unsheltered are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Various studies estimate
the prevalence of dependency differently, but Cicero’s claim
definitely has a chicken/egg problem. People who did not previously
abuse substances may begin doing so because of the trauma and stress
of homelessness. For example, a Canadian study
[[link removed]] associated
becoming unhoused with starting injection drug use. If you want to
keep people off drugs, the data suggests that getting them into
housing is a sound strategy.

Asked for details about facilities to receive unhoused people under
the executive order, the White House Press Office provided a fact
sheet
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included no such details. An internet search found no requests for
proposals to build or operate facilities related to the executive
order. But it did turn up an interesting video produced by
Lonsdale’s former company Palantir, touting its capacity to track
unhoused people [[link removed]].

Prior to beginning his second term, President-elect Trump issued a
video saying that he would ban urban camping and “create tent cities
where the homeless can be relocated and their problems identified.”
Will unhoused people become the new immigrants, a profit center for
the surveillance and detention industries? The model legislation
promoted by Cicero directs states to stop funding housing first and
instead fund camps and shelters that meet specific requirements.
For-profit entities operating these facilities have generous
protection from liability under the model legislation, which reads:
“A private campground owner or an employee or officer of a private
campground operating such facility pursuant to this section shall be
immune from liability for all civil claims, excluding claims involving
the person’s intentional or grossly negligent conduct, arising out
of the ownership, operation, management, or other control of such
facility.”

Tracie Bernardi Guzman, founder of the nonprofit Reentry Solutions CT
Inc., advocated for state legislation in Connecticut that would have
increased housing rights for people with criminal records. The bill
never made it to the floor.

Guzman works to help men exiting prison find employment. She has
clients sleeping in alleys, elevators, and in one case a dumpster.
Another was staying in a homeless shelter when he got a third-shift
job. The 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. hours would require him to violate the
shelter’s curfew, which would get him thrown out. He chose the job
over the bed.

“It’s such a catch-22,” she said. It’s hard to get housing if
you don’t have a job; and hard to get a job if you don’t have
housing, she explained. Getting either is difficult for someone with a
criminal record. Guzman’s own felony conviction led to her family,
which includes a husband and stepchildren, being told to leave their
apartment. The stigma that goes along with a criminal record can be
hard to shake, she said.

“People that turn people away for employment or turn people away for
housing, they don’t realize they’re actually contributing to the
recidivism rate,” she said. “They are making society a lot less
safe.”

Stigma renders both people who have been incarcerated and people who
are unhoused easy targets. Rabinowitz thinks that the administration
is criminalizing homelessness “in the service of
authoritarianism.” In other words, the federal government is carving
out a right to lock up people who have not committed a crime. “We
also know that fascism is operationalized by testing out policies on
groups of people that are believed to have little public sympathy,”
he said. “In America, that includes folks who live outside.”

_[COLLEEN SHADDOX is a writer and co-author, with Joanne Goldblum, of
‘Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty
[[link removed]].’]_

_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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_

_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2025 [[link removed]].
All rights reserved.  _

_Support the American Prospect [[link removed]]._

_Click here [[link removed]] to support the Prospect's
brand of independent impact journalism._

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* unemployment
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* Donald Trump
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* Fascism
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* Law & Justice
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