Of course, public sympathy has always gone foremost to law-abiding, well-meaning, working-poor families who couldn’t make rent and wound up on the street. It has even been argued that this cohort constitutes the lion’s share of our nation’s homeless, and I, for one, believe it, given the rapacity of the landlord class under decaying, financialized, very late capitalism. The National Institutes of Health in October 2020 backed this up, noting that only 25 to 30 percent of homeless people suffer afflictions like schizophrenia. On the other hand, the insane lack the appeal of unjustly evicted families, while these days fewer of them may well sleep on sidewalk grates or in sewers. But when homelessness really surged in this country back in the mid-1970s, the transparent cause was the idiotic new policy of ejecting patients from asylums with nothing but bus fare and 30-days-worth of meds. Well do I recall the small corner park in my Manhattan neighborhood, which went from being always empty at twilight one evening to being permanently packed with vagabonds literally the next. The new, cheapskate policy for those in mental agony had taken root.
This is not to say that the other leg of Trump’s policy for the unhoused, namely enforcement, is anything but sickening. That’s exactly what it is. “Enforcement,” when applied to destitute people means rousting them out of their meager shelter, like tents, so that they can sleep under the stars. If the Trump policy provided four walls and a roof to those it dispossesses of their sleeping bags, I’d be all for it. But it doesn’t. It supposedly provides mandatory mental health and substance abuse help, and to the extent that it does so without violence, that’s a good thing. But police clearing encampments, often in search of immigrants, and telling everyone to just beat it, is not a policy. It is the disguised, fascist underside of capitalism, aka cruelty.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 4.2 million “youth and young adults” are homeless annually. They are not all orphans. That means a good percentage of them are accompanied by at least one unsheltered adult. To get an idea of how many adults that means, you must break the numbers down: “Public schools identified more than 1.5 million students,” as unhoused in 2023-2024, per AI. In 2026, almost 450,000 infants and toddlers were homeless, while roughly 700,000 “youth are unaccompanied minors,” reports the NCSL. So add 1.5 million public school students to 450,000 babies and you’ve almost got 2 million destitute children, every two or three of which are attended by an equally destitute, nomadic adult; at the very least – my guess is more – 1 million adult Americans without formal lodging, and that’s just the ones with kids. Politicos like California governor Gavin Newsom and Trump, who want to sweep them out of sight or supreme court justices like Neil Gorsuch who empower such bigwigs to do so are not merely iniquitous – they are trying to conceal an ocean of absolute poverty behind a fence of straws. And they mangle the lives of the dispossessed in the process.
Moves like the Trump regime’s April 15 assault on Catholic Charities, by stripping it of $11 million to retaliate against Pope Leo, are repulsive. On X, Substack reporter Christopher Hale called this attack “an unprecedented violation of religious liberty…shutting down a shelter for homeless children – just days after President Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV.” According to the National Catholic Reporter April 16, the Trump-cancelled contract to shelter unaccompanied migrant children occurred partly in the context of an abrupt 2025 cessation “of a decades-long partnership with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for refugee resettlement.” Catholic Charities, per the Miami Herald, provided, “the equivalent of a federally funded foster care system” like the one run by the states.
For these orphans, getting guardians in foster care is literally the gold standard. It is, realistically, the best they can hope for. If eviscerating federal efforts in this direction is white house policy, we’ve got a problem, namely government institutionalization and expansion of the social wound already ripped open by our sick economic system, a wound called homelessness. Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami told the NCR of this Trump-targeted program’s many benefits, “given the trauma that many of these children have endured before arriving in the U.S.” he might have added that most arrive from Central American nations already flayed raw by U.S. financial pirates, so Washington bears responsibility for those childhood traumas, to say the least.
It is immaterial why the white house did this; but in this action multiple lousy purposes do converge: punishing the pope for criticizing the astoundingly stupid Iran War, terrorizing nonwhite immigrants, abusing the homeless, all of whom are basically regarded by the uni-party as detention-camp material with the possible exception of homeless veterans. You want the only proof of this possible preference? The stat on the veteran unhoused is that their numbers dropped by 7.5 percent from 2023 to early 2025, for a new low total of 32,882, because over 50,000 veterans found abodes by 2025. But who’s complaining? Not me. Any decrease in the millions of Americans living rough is laudable, though it’s sad that you must kill or risk being killed in the American military to merit government attention to you sleeping on a park bench. (It was the Veterans Administration, largely, that housed these former soldiers.)
Trump has gone large, very large in promising domiciles for veterans, yet according to the L.A. Times April 22, “veteran housing is AWOL in the VA budget proposal.” More specifically, el jefe “promised housing for 6,000 veterans at the West L.A. VA campus, but the VA’s budget proposal requests no funding for a single new bed,” mystifying and disappointing vets. “The budget would displace about 330 current residents from treatment programs with no indication where they would be temporarily housed or for how long.”
Think back to last May and Trump’s grand words about a new National Center for Warrior Independence in West Los Angeles. Well, those warriors will be independent all right – independent to sleep under overpasses or, if they’re lucky, in their cars. Adding insult to injury, this new non-budget for homeless vets “comes as Trump is asking for a colossal $445 billion increase in the defense budget and spending billions every week on a deeply unpopular war with Iran.”
So maybe the uni-party’s romance with veterans doesn’t really extend to those who sleep without beds or have to use public toilets. Maybe when push comes to shove, our rulers fall silent, because they have no intention of spending one freakin’ dime on any beggar in rags. Such people truly are non-persons to our rulers, our economy, our society, except when it’s campaign time; then they snag their moment in the sun until, the usual again, which is, from the dems and the GOP – all talk and no action.