Phil Roeder (CC BY 2.0)
Tents near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., June 2021.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Mint released quarter coins featuring Stacey Park Milbern, a disability rights activist who died in 2020 at the age of thirty-three, as part of the “American Women Quarters” series initiated during the Biden Administration. If the current huckster currently occupying the White House had been in office at that time, I’m sure he never would have allowed such a DEI-infected project to survive. The back of the special quarter depicts Milbern sitting in her wheelchair alongside the phrase “Disability Justice.” Depicting a woman in a wheelchair on U.S. currency, along with the phrase “disability justice,” is a direct challenge to traditional views about keeping disabled folks out of sight and out of mind.
But while the huckster allowed the Milbern quarter to go into distribution, his recent actions have proven that he doesn’t consider the lives of disabled people to be worth all that much. At the end of July, the huckster issued an Executive Order to facilitate the removal of homeless people off the streets through police escalation and involuntary commitment into inpatient psychiatric care, essentially criminalizing homelessness.
The order attributes the nationwide prevalence of homelessness to mental illness, stating that a “large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions.” The huckster’s solution, then, is to institutionalize people who are unhoused, forgoing federal spending on “failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes” in favor of “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings” to “restore public order.”
In other words, the huckster’s idea of addressing the root cases of homelessness is to get people who have psychiatric disabilities and/or substance use disorder out of sight and out of mind by locking them up indefinitely in isolated institutions, against their will. And, much like its ongoing deportation frenzy, the administration will carry out this siege of removals from public life under the guise of maintaining law and order.
Not only is this another example of the convenient victim blaming that the huckster loves to do, but for disabled folks, this represents a big step backward for civil liberties. According to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights, the Executive Order seeks to expand civil commitment laws to allow for broader use of forced psychiatric treatment in both inpatient and outpatient settings, “rolling back decades of progress in disability rights, due process protections, and community integration.” The order will affect those deemed to have severe mental illnesses, serious developmental disability, or even substance abuse issues, and will specifically target unhoused individuals by weaponizing their lack of housing as supposed evidence of inability to make sound decisions about their care and wellbeing.
The American Civil Liberties Union has also sounded the alarm on the order. “Pushing people into locked institutions and forcing treatment won’t solve homelessness or support people with disabilities,” ACLU attorney Scout Katovich stated in a July press release. “Institutions are dangerous and deadly, and forced treatment doesn’t work. We need safe, decent, and affordable housing as well as equal access to medical care and voluntary, community-based mental health and evidence-based substance use treatment from trusted providers.”
For decades, American society has shirked its responsibility to actively welcome disabled people into our communities and provide non-punitive care within those communities, instead getting us out of sight and out of mind by locking us up indefinitely in isolated institutions against our will. Trump’s bid to sweep unhoused people into inpatient mental health facilities—regardless of whether they constitute a true danger to themselves or others, or are even likely to benefit from psychiatric treatment—looks like a return to that lazy and destructive mentality.