When President Donald Trump released the sinisterly titled Executive Order “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” my immediate thought was that I knew where this was headed. Scattered throughout was language alleging “care,” “treatment,” and “safety,” as the Executive Order clearly outlines plans to mass-institutionalize people experiencing homelessness or perceived mental disability. My suspicions were confirmed.
My second thought was, “This is already here.” From Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom’s “CARE courts” to the massively profitable psychiatric-industrial complex, people caught between the intersection of ableism and other forms of oppression have long been subjected to involuntary treatment, shrouded by the more appeasing definition of “care.” I know because I’ve lived through it.
I first experienced involuntary psychiatric institutionalization when I was thirteen years old. I was experiencing abuse in my family home in suburban Chicago. Unable to find a way out of my situation, I sank into a deep depression. I stopped sleeping and eating. I wanted to feel safety and agency over my life, and absent that, I didn’t want to live at all.
But in the psychiatric ward that I was placed in, safety and agency were nowhere to be found. Having a psychiatric diagnosis eschewed accountability for the harm I had experienced, and I became the problem—the only one. My behavior was labeled by clinicians and staff as pathological and troubling, rather than a natural result of the violence that had caused my distress. I told one clinician about some of the abuse at home, which she dismissed, and I quickly learned that it would be safer not to say anything at all.
What’s more, every aspect of my life and treatment in the psychiatric ward was determined without my consent—including the drugs I was forced to take, the violating strip searches, and instances of solitary confinement. I understood that a psychiatric diagnosis allowed adults to erode my credibility. It was a way to ensure that I would never be believed, and that the people who abused me would never be held accountable.
When I was released from the hospital after nine days, my father exploited my deepened vulnerability to perpetrate sexual abuse. Thus began a cycle where I was forced into treatment every time my distress threatened to reveal our family secret. This cycle continued for several months. Then, just three days after I graduated middle school, my family sent me more than 1,000 miles away from home to live in a private residential facility.
In the facility, I was permitted almost no access to communication with the outside world, and had no say as to whether or not I might ever return to my community again. I was made to perform forced labor, such as farm work, for the facility, which made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of my and the other young residents’ placement there. Once, I witnessed my housemate, a girl like me in her early teens, being abducted in the middle of the night. I listened in bewildered terror to her crying and screaming as they dragged her out of her bed. I later learned she had been trafficked to another program in Utah—a state that has become infamous for harboring some of the most abusive “troubled teen” facilities in the country.
It has now been more than a decade since I was last institutionalized in any psychiatric facility. Yet I watch news on my phone of government agents dragging people out of their beds at night, taken away to be placed in for-profit immigrant detention. I don’t feel shock or surprise. I remember my housemate in the residential facility and feel a painful flicker of recognition. Immigrants or people of color who are racially profiled have thus far been the Trump Administration’s primary target for involuntary detention.
Illustration by Rachel Litchman
Then, in October 2025, The New York Times published an article outlining Utah’s plan to enact Trump’s vision with the proposed construction of a huge homeless detention camp, which officials called an “accountability center.” The intended population: the presumed poor, homeless, disabled, and mentally ill. “It’s what they did in World War II in Japanese detention camps,” advocate Jesse Rabinowitz told the Times. The National Homelessness Law Center responded to the plan with a call to stop the facility from being built, writing that “locking away anyone you don’t like isn’t going to solve homelessness.”
I found myself wondering if either the Times reporters who broke the story or the advocates at the National Homelessness Law Center who responded were people like me, with lived experience of both forced institutionalization and homelessness. As someone with this background, I know that you don’t have to stretch so far back in our history to find an era rife with this particular flavor of state-sanctioned violence. Historians and policymakers cite the 1990s, when many state mental hospitals closed, as an endpoint to the era of asylums and mass institutionalization in the United States. This shift was in part a product of the disability civil rights movement, which had long fought to close these institutions due to the horrific abuse and segregation that occurred there. Throughout the 1970s, the movement helped secure many key civil rights victories, including the verdict in Lessard v. Schmidt, which was intended to prevent involuntary commitment without due process. From this perspective, deinstitutionalization was a win.
But many other crucial measures failed, including the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, which was meant to increase the number of community mental health services and supportive housing as institutions closed. Accordingly, many civil rights advocates have overlooked the extent to which the closure of mass psychiatric institutions has simply shifted the form of institutionalization into prisons, private facilities, and group homes. And, because institutionalization is commonly understood to be “over,” there is a lack of public outrage over its persistence in newer forms.
In reality, involuntary institutionalization has never ended, as my own childhood experiences reflect. In fact, similar to other forms of incarceration such as immigrant detention, the privatization of forced mental health treatment has only made it more profitable and harder to regulate. Abuse in these facilities has not gone away either, including rampant sexual, physical, and emotional abuse that has resulted in dozens of deaths each year. These dangers are heightened for children, who lack the legal right to decline treatment if parents or guardians consent to it, and can be displaced from their homes permanently through the child welfare system or their parents’ demands.
This is why it came as no surprise when I read that Utah would serve as the testing ground for the Trump Administration’s detention camps for people experiencing homelessness and mental illness. It’s not even a test, really—these types of abusive facilities are already here, albeit in more covert forms. I remembered how confused I felt as a child that my rights could so quickly be taken. I had committed no crime—except, it seemed, of being unable to find a way out of the violence that disabled me.
Now, as I witness people getting swept up off the streets and into detention facilities after fleeing domestic violence, being denied access to affordable housing, or being unable to afford a medical bill, it seems to me that this is their supposed crime, too.
Institutionalization has been allowed to operate largely unchecked against people who the state views as less than human, less entitled to civil rights, and less reliable narrators—particularly when those people are children. An end to the new detention camps must also mean an end to all the existing structures that have allowed the government to erode agency and autonomy for people labeled disabled or mentally ill.
My own experiences of involuntary institutionalization feel like echoes of the newest expansion of forced treatment—because they are, fundamentally, its inspiration. Only when we recognize that institutionalization never went away can we imagine a future where all people are liberated from it.