Homeless EO Will Round Up Homeless Men

Okay so let's review Trump's Executive Order signed on Thursday July 24th 2025 called Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets. It stands on the June 2025 Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass which found that cities and municipalities could in fact ticket homeless people to prevent them from setting up homeless camps. Trump's EO provides funding to set up temporary processing camps like Alligator Alcatraz staffed by doctors, psychiatrists, and drug rehab specialists to process all homeless men that anyone wants to round up, and all paid for with Housing and Urban Development funds. The EO also provides funding to open more housing for homeless women and children and specifically bars men from being housed along with the women and children.

There are about 775,000 homeless people at any given time in the United States and about 2/3 are men so approximately a half million men will be targeted to be rounded up off the streets while housing for a quarter million women and children is being set up. At first only the Red States will comply and all the Blue States will ignore the federal government, ignore the funds, and only ticket the homeless to keep them from setting up homeless camps. While they may open more shelters for women, don't expect any Blue State like California or New York to actually round up homeless men. However in the Red States like Florida and Texas and most of the South expect all homeless men to be rounded up, so basically a half million homeless men are at risk in the US but a quarter million men will be rounded up first in the Red States.

Somewhere along the lines of 80% of all homeless men either suffer from drug addiction or mental conditions, and 10% of all homeless are veterans of the US military that typically self medicate with marijuana to control their PTSD. So they plan on doing triage and sorting the homeless men into drug addicts, psychiatric patients, and criminals, and will institutionalize all of them accordingly under the concept of civil commitment, like an involuntary hospital hold if it is deemed that you are a danger to yourself or others, but those are for only 72 hours, the Homeless EO says they will use civil commitment to place the homeless in institutions, apparently indefinitely like they used to do in California before 1967.

To be fair, it is nearly impossible to fix drug addiction with intervention, you can't fix mental disease, and you can't fix criminal thinking, so if we need to institutionalize a half million homeless men, so be it. But what about the veterans? We can't institutionalize them. May I suggest a public works program like FDR did with the WPA to employ the homeless vets? But you do have to give them regular marijuana smoke breaks to control their PTSD. Let them do tree planting, or build a high speed rail, anything other than throwing them into an institution after they served our country.

One problem that sticks out is that the federal government doesn’t recognize legal marijuana, so may claim that homeless vets self medicating with marijuana have Cannabis Use Disorder (which doesn't exist - everyone self medicates), or claim through false corollary evidence that high potency marijuana causes mental disorders (it doesn’t - again, everyone self medicates, and smart people know that it is better for your lungs to smoke less of a higher THC marijuana than more of a lower THC marijuana for the same effect), and so the federal government Homeless Processing Camps will likely deny everyone with PTSD including veterans from using marijuana in the camps. This will constitute torture and inhumane treatment because only the THC in marijuana can almost immediately relieve the symptoms of PTSD. THC fits into the same receptors as anandamide, which is low in people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so within 30 seconds to a minute of smoking some marijuana the PTSD starts to subside.

Having Trump in charge doesn't help because Trump is a teetotaler that only drinks Diet Coke, he doesn't use alcohol or any other drugs, and in fact the only things he has ever said about marijuana is that when it becomes legal he wants there to be spaces where people like him don't have to even smell it, so don't expect any compassion from Trump for veterans with PTSD that use marijuana to control their panic attacks. One of Trump's brothers died of alcoholism, and other than that Trump has no apparent experience with drug addiction like Joe Biden had with Hunter Biden, so Trump may just lack the real world experience necessary to even have compassion for drug addicts. Most of his focus seems to be on stopping Fentanyl from entering the country, and now apparently he thinks drug rehabs work despite decades of evidence that they don't work for the vast majority of people, especially when done in an involuntary way like in an intervention.

Ronald Reagan was a champion of deinstitutionalization where larger entities like the state stopped taking care of people in institutions to save money. Reagan signed the 1967 LPS Act which ended indefinite detention in mental facilities in California, so it is said that Ronald Reagan emptied the mental institutions and Jerry Brown emptied the prisons. When Reagan became president in 1981 he ended direct federal grants for community mental health centers nationwide, which resulted in the sudden appearance of crazy homeless people all across the United States starting in 1981.

Now 44 years later Trump is going to round up all of the crazy homeless men and institutionalize them. I guess it was a failed experiment in deinstitutionalization, exemplified by Skid Row in Los Angeles and the Kingston section of Philadelphia. Since involuntary drug rehab is not a viable solution they are going to need to start building lots and lots of mental hospitals to house the estimated 400,000 homeless men with either mental disease or addiction issues.

After the Red States comply Trump may send federal troops in to round up the homeless men in the Blue States, picking up the remaining quarter million homeless men. If they actually do create housing for a quarter million homeless women and children, and actually do institutionalize a half million homeless men that would improve crime and disorder on America’s streets by eliminating the homeless, but at what cost to civil liberties? Institutionalization is one option, but another is the Works Progress Administration of FDR that addressed homelessness during the Great Depression, which is a far more reasonable solution to homeless veterans than locking them up in mental institutions indefinitely and torturing them by denying them medical marijuana for their PTSD.