White House threatens Washington homeless with jail

Homeless people in Washington, D.C., could face jail time if they do not comply with President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on crime and rid the US capital of homeless encampments, the White House says.

“Homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment, to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental-health services, and if they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters.

Leavitt said the administration was exploring strategies to relocate homeless individuals “far from the capital.”

She said US Park Police have removed 70 homeless encampments from federal parks since March and are set to clear the remaining two encampments in the city later this week.

Andy Wassenich, director of policy at Miriam’s Kitchen - an organisation offering services to the homeless - said his team was out trying to warn people.

He said there was still a lot of confusion about what the crackdown may bring.

Their best advice, he said, was: “Go to shelter if you can, if you can stand it. If you have anybody you can stay with, get off the street, and seek safety and let us know what we can do for you.”

Trump said on social media that he wanted the homeless out of Washington even before he announced the extraordinary step of temporarily taking over the District of Columbia’s police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops as part of a crackdown on crime there - an effort that also includes another 500 federal law enforcement agents.

A billionaire real estate developer, Trump described the homeless as one of several groups who have “overtaken” Washington that include “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs.”

He likened his intended crackdown to his administration’s actions to secure the US border with Mexico.

US communities have long experienced seemingly intractable problems with homelessness, which reached an all-time national high of over 771,000 men, women and children on a single night in 2024, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s latest homelessness report to Congress.

The HUD report estimated Washington’s homeless population at 5616, a 14.1 per cent increase from the year before. That made Washington, a city of just over 700,000 people, the 16th out of the 20 US cities with the largest homeless populations, according to the website USA Facts. The top five cities are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle and Denver.

But the District of Columbia had the highest prevalence of homelessness among US states, with 83 homeless individuals for every 10,000 people, HUD data showed.

with DPA