When President Donald Trump said last week that homeless people needed to move out of the District of Columbia “immediately” — threatening jail time for anyone who didn’t get out of the city — he raised a pressing question for local officials: Where would the homeless go?
Trump’s efforts to break up homeless encampments and “rescue” the city from “squalor” have undoubtedly displaced a number of people who lack housing.
As of Thursday, a White House official told NOTUS that 48 homeless encampments had been removed from the District, though D.C. council member Matthew Frumin told NOTUS that number seemed like an overcount. (He suggested the administration could be counting each clean up of “someone’s property on federal land” as an encampment.)