Area Service Providers React to Last Week's Executive Order on Homelessness
The order criminalizes homelessness, providers say.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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The Trump Administration last week released an Executive Order on the topic of unsheltered homelessness, and Fredericksburg area service providers fear it signals a move towards criminalizing homelessness and mental illness.
The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” states that “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.”
“The EO language generalizes homeless persons as ‘public safety threats,’ thereby criminalizing [them],” said David Cooper, chief executive officer of the Brisben Center, in an email to the Advance this week.
“An indeterminant number (nationally and locally) of homeless people may present with issues of mental health and substance misuse/addictions. Many, perhaps most, are in survival mode,” Cooper continued. “Maladaptive thoughts and behaviors by some should not be applied generally to define threats to public safety by ‘all’ homeless persons.”
The order directs the Attorney General to reverse judicial precedents that limit state and local governments’ ability to involuntarily commit homeless individuals who pose a risk to themselves or others, and to direct federal resources towards ensuring that “detainees with serious mental illness are not released into the public because of a lack of forensic bed capacity at appropriate local, State, and Federal jails or hospitals.”
It directs agencies to fast-track funding for programs that enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, and urban camping, loitering, and squatting; and that move people with mental illness or addiction off the streets and into treatment facilities.
Additionally, it directs the Department of Health and Human Services to “take steps to” require that persons participating in federally-funded homeless assistance programs must undergo mental health and substance abuse treatment as a condition of participation.
Meghann Cotter, executive director of Micah Ministries, told the Advance in an interview that, “The way I read that executive order is that we’re going back to the institutionalization of people with mental illness without an acknowledgement that there’s a reason that didn’t work.”
“What we’ve forgotten is that back in the 1960s and 70s, our response to the mentally ill was to lock them away. When we de-institutionalized, the goal was always to rebuild those support systems in a dignified, healthy way, in community, and we never did that,” Cotter said. “When you see seriously mentally ill people on the street, it is a horrible symptom of resources and supports that were never adequately funded or staffed in community.”
She continued, “So we’re living with decades-old problems that we never adequately addressed and the hard part is that now we’re blaming the people who are in those situations, calling them criminals and literally putting them in jail.”
Cotter said Micah’s planned Jeremiah Community, which the organization is fundraising for, is an example of what caring for the mentally ill in community could look like.
Cooper also characterized instances of street homelessness as a “symptom” of a larger problem.
“Persons in homeless encampments and lingering in downtowns across America are a ‘symptom’ of deeper structural, systemic, societal issues,” he said. “Merciful, hand-up, justice-promoting treatment is essential. America and our local community need multiple, decent, humane, effective, cost-mitigating approaches and places to sustainably and safely resolve homelessness.”
Cooper noted that according to the Executive Order, the number of individuals living on the streets in the U.S. on a single night during the last year—274,224—was the highest ever recorded. But in the Fredericksburg area, he pointed out, chronic homelessness decreased by 50% from 2023 to 2024, according to the 2024 Point in Time Count.
The order also states that “the overwhelming majority” of homeless individuals “are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.” But Cooper pointed to a UC San Francisco-led study of 3,200 homeless adults, published in February of this year, which found that less than half regularly used drugs in the preceding six months.
“Our research shows there is an increased risk of becoming homeless if you use drugs; and that homelessness itself increases drug use because people use it as a coping strategy,” said Margot Kushel, the study’s director. “But despite public perception,” Kushel said, “most people who are homeless aren’t using drugs regularly.”
Cooper said that of Brisben Center clients served in the last year, 11% reported substance abuse issues and 18% reported mental health diagnoses. Almost half the clients were children between the ages of 0 and 17 and 40% of adult females reported experiencing domestic violence.
Another section of the Executive Order directs the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to stop funding programs that “fail to achieve adequate outcomes, including so-called ‘harm reduction’ or ‘safe consumption’ efforts that only facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.”
Carmen Greiner, chair of Save 1 Life Fredericksburg, a coalition of local agencies, providers and community members that employ harm reduction strategies to reduce drug overdose, said that such strategies have been attributed to a decrease in the number of opioid overdose deaths.
“This is the opposite of ‘[a failure] to achieve adequate outcomes,” she wrote in an email.
Greiner said Save 1 Life does not get direct funding from SAMHSA, but that the coalition’s partner organizations “certainly” do.
“We get most of our harm reduction supplies for free through the Virginia Department of Health, [Rappahannock Area Community Services Board] and Fredericksburg Area Health and Support Services,” she said. “We give out Narcan [the opioid overdose reversal medication], drug test kits, and condoms supplied by [the Virginia Department of Health].”
Since February of this year, the coalition has distributed more than 350 boxes of Narcan provided by VDH, Greiner said. At a retail cost of $45 per box, the coalition could not afford to purchase that many.
“Therefore, if grant funding gets cut to agencies such as VDH, we may lose access to a resource that is saving lives,” she said.
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