2025-08-15 21:54:29
Last month, energized by growing membership and recent electoral victories—including Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral primary win—the Democratic Socialists of America convened in Chicago. The disagreements were the usual for the group: the needs of electoralism pitted against the goals of radicalism. But, overall, the goal was the same. DSA wants to win.
Building support outside its base was a recurring theme throughout the convention. This year, for the first time, DSA hosted 40 outside guests. They represented labor unions, community organizations, and international political parties. “We need relationships with regular people who believe a better world is possible,” said Laura Waldin, from Portland, Oregon, who organized the political exchange.
The guests included keynote speaker Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who gave a rallying speech. But she also pushed DSA. The congresswoman took them to task for not having a diverse enough leadership body and urged delegates to organize on the street and in face-to-face conversations. It is DSA’s duty “to cultivate this power—people power—into a force that can fight fascism,” she said.
That fight may soon take on a new dimension. The more than 1200 assembled delegates voted to field a presidential candidate in 2028 so that working class struggles can take center stage.
Jeremy Cohan, former co-chair of NYC DSA and newly elected member of the National Political Committee, joined DSA after campaigning for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and voted for the measure to bring forward a 2028 candidate. He said it was a mistake to have sat out of the 2024 election and not confronted Biden. “The primary is a site of struggle,” Cohan told me.
Internal member disputes and financial woes had stymied the DSA national governing body in the past few years. But local chapters have grown rapidly. Around 250 DSA members hold elected office nationwide. Portland’s city council has four DSA members in a 12-person council. And, earlier this month, DSA member Denzel McCampbell squeaked out a primary victory for Detroit City Council. (Campbell volunteers powered by DSA knocked on 15,000 doors.)
In July, Minnesota state senator and DSA member Omar Fateh won his primary for mayor of Minneapolis against an incumbent candidate. And, of course, there is Zohran Mamdani, whose historic campaign helped double the NYC DSA chapter to over 11,000 members, by far the largest in the country. A recent Siena poll has Mamdani 20 points ahead of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in the November mayoral race.
While electoral wins may be the most visible manifestation of DSA strength, its other areas of militant organizing attract many members, too. Jessica Czarnecki, a restaurant hostess from Brunswick, Maine, joined DSA in June 2023 after she and co-workers at her local coffee shop went on strike and were shut out by their boss. She recalled how DSA showed up on the picket line and financially contributed to a strike fund.
“I need to be in an organization that made a material difference in my life,” she said. While she and her co-workers lost the strike and the coffee house shut down, she doesn’t see it as a loss. “The connections we made from that experience is the win,” she said. She has personally recruited around 20 new members to her DSA chapter, and they organized a tenants’ rights meeting last year.
Dominic Bruno, an electrician from Pittsburgh, said he joined up after DSA members defended him against police officer at a 2017 protest to honor Heather Heyer, who was killed at the white power Unite the Right rally in Charlottsville.
Since then he’s worked to build the chapter of around 700 members by bringing “social back into socialism.” The group hosts cocktails for comrades and coffee for comrades, hiking meet ups, free shops and swaps, mutual aid, twice monthly hot food distros, and a DSA community garden.
2025-08-15 21:17:04
In March, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a woman they accused of drug trafficking and entering the country illegally. Standing in a parking lot, they photographed her, weeping, eyes half-closed in anguish, her arms cuffed behind her back. And then—in a cruel innovation specific to the Trump administration—the White House’s official Twitter account used an AI tool to make a cartoon illustration of her crying and handcuffed, in the style of the beloved Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The tweet got 155,000 likes, a mix of outraged and delighted responses, and, as it was designed to, a lot of attention: it’s so far been viewed 76 million times. On Twitter, many users posted positive responses declaring that the image was exactly what they had voted for.
“It’s classic, textbook propaganda.”
This is, at the moment, the official voice of the U.S. government: a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating, an effort, as Wired’s Tess Owen recently put it, to turn actions like mass deportation into “one big joke.” On Instagram and Twitter (their largest audience), government entities including the White House, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security attempt to surf viral trends to expanded public attention: they twist memes and sounds popular on TikTok, repurpose South Park’s parodies for their own self-promotion, and blend it all with images that draw on or directly reproduce classical art and Americana paintings that are designed to stir nostalgia for an imagined past. (The use of some of this art, as the Washington Post has written, has stirred the ire of the artists themselves or their representatives; it’s not easy to extract a stern condemnation from the estate of treacly pastoral painter Thomas Kinkade, but this government managed to do it.)
A lot of the trends are specifically designed to appeal to young white men, like one that repurposes a 1970s-looking ad for a van to ask, “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” Another ICE recruitment effort asks “Which way, American man?” in front a befuddled-looking Uncle Sam gazing at a crossroads post labeled with signs including “INVASION,” “CULTURAL DECLINE” pointing one way, and, pointing the other, “SERVICE,” “OPPORTUNITY”; in Uncle Sam’s hands lies “LAW AND ORDER.” The phrase “Which way, American man” is a barely-altered reference to the phrase “Which way, Western man?,” the title of a book by white nationalist author William Gayley Simpson that’s been popularized by the far-right as a meme. In this case, the white supremacist undertones are more like overtones.
While the government uses social media to bolster its philosophical choices on issues like mass deportations, it also deploys it to prop up support for deeply unpopular aspects of its plans, like “Alligator Alcatraz”—an immigration detention camp, trolling opportunity, marketing bonanza for amoral swag-sellers, including Florida’s attorney general. Before the tent prison was even officially open, Trump administration officials and their proxies in right-wing media bragged about the camp, joked about escapees dying by alligator and python, and made AI-generated images of President Trump standing alongside alligators wearing ICE hats.
Disinformation researchers and experts on propaganda have followed the sludge and bile emanating from these governmental accounts with alarm.
“What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism,” says Jason Stanley; he’s a philosopher, author, and professor at University of Toronto who’s in the process of leaving the United States because of, as he baldly puts it, “concerns over fascism.”
The memes about brutal detention and deportation, specifically, invite audiences to delight in what Stanley calls “torture,” to see themselves in what the government is doing, to say, as he puts it, “This is something we’re doing together, we’re having a blast, we’re laughing and those wimpy liberals are saying it’s scandalous. We’re going to show our power over them by having as much fun as possible.”
“They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.”
Stanley says that it’s part of the overall structure of what his colleague Timothy Snyder calls “sadopopulism“: putting policies into place that inflict real pain and harm on the U.S. populace, while also encouraging scapegoating and xenophobia against stigmatized groups. (“If you hurt people you create a resource of pain, of anxiety and fear which you then direct against others,” Snyder explains in a video explaining the concept.)
“What they’re offering people is not health insurance or economic security,” Stanley says, “They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.”
“It’s classic, textbook propaganda” echoes Joan Donovan, a disinformation scholar and the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute; she’s also a co-author of the book Meme Wars, which looked at how the far-right has weaponized memes to draw people to their cause.
“They’re most effective when they’re authorless,” Donovan says, as the government’s have been. But she suspects the memes are being produced by younger men, “who work for relatively cheap or for free, for the glory of Trump resharing a meme. And they do see themselves similar to the way that QAnon [adherents] did, being digital soldiers, being part of the information war.”
The government’s expanded, meme-heavy propaganda efforts, Donovan points out, are happening at the the same time that ICE is lifting the age cap on who can join, and sharing memes about fathers and sons joining together to hunt migrants.
Donovan worries about the effect these propaganda efforts will have on the far-right, and the effect for them to create “a new, potentially very violent street movement that’s being catalyzed right now through the use of these dehumanizing memes and also the recruitment by ICE.” Outside government, she says, ‘there’s a larger cultural shift,” with extremists more present and blatant on social media: “There’s quite a bit more derogatory memes and content flowing through X and other social media platforms.”
Attempts to sanitize and popularize state violence through mass media and popular culture go back far further than the edgelords manning the Twitter controls at ICE, of course. During the Holocaust, cartoons envisioning Jews as rats were meant to provoke loathing and disgust, linking them with disease and contagion—something to be cast out of the body of society. Supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ past president, helped popularized his brutal and deadly drug war through what Buzzfeed News called “a never-ending meme-driven propaganda campaign.” Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that Russian milbloggers—ultranationalist and often explicitly pro-war accounts—hugely increased the number of propagandistic, and often manipulated, images they were posting on Telegram in the two weeks leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It’s an example of another government deploying what the researchers call “Politically Salient Image Patterns,” which, as they put it, “serve to influence, demean, manipulate, and motivate various audience segments.”
Using trolling to thinly veil a serious, and deeply bigoted, aim is also not new. In late 2017, for instance, Gawker‘s Ashley Feinberg obtained a copy of the style guide for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” its author wrote, while going on to admit that his real objective was to “gas” Jewish people, who he identified with a slur. Openly calling for violence was forbidden at the site, but the guide directed that “whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of.” And the author counseled that writers for the site should “always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration.”
The walk between those sentiments and the people now behind the government’s social media wheels is far shorter than it should be. “These accounts are offering up a view of America that isn’t about inclusivity and democracy,” Donovan says. “We need to help people understand the symbols and what’s happening in the background… It’s so important for young people to have a sense of pride of place and duty to their country. But not in this way, not in a way that oppresses the human dignity of others.”
History, Donovan adds, “is our cipher here. It’s going to help decode some of the imagery, the dog whistles, the derivative way in which they’re using aspects of culture, the grotesque and cheap versions of Uncle Sam.”
And in the end, she says, whether it comes sooner or far too late for the victims it’s meant to dehumanize, “There’s a price to pay for that kind of behavior.”
2025-08-15 18:00:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Cody Two Bear, who is Standing Rock Sioux, served on his tribal council during the Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2017. Growing up in a community powered by coal, the experience was transformative. “I’ve seen the energy extraction that has placed a toll significantly on tribal nations when it comes to land, animals, water, and sacred sites,” said Two Bear. “Understanding more about that energy, I started to look into my own tribe as a whole.”
In 2018, Two Bear founded Indigenize Energy, a nonprofit organization that works with tribes to pursue energy sovereignty and economic development by kickstarting clean energy projects. Last year, with nearly $136 million in federal funding through Solar for All, a program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, the nonprofit launched the Tribal Renewable Energy Coalition, which aims to build solar projects with 14 tribal nations in the Northern Plains.
But when President Donald Trump took office in January, those projects hit a wall: The Trump administration froze Solar for All’s funding. That temporarily left the coalition and its members earlier this year without access to their entitled grant (it was later released in March). However, the EPA is considering ending the program entirely.
The coalition is back on track with its solar plans, but now tribes and organizations, like the ones Two Bear works with, are bracing for new changes.
When President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, or OBBB, became law last month, incentives for clean energy projects like wind and solar tax credits and clean energy grants were cut—a blow to the renewable energy sector and a major setback to tribal nations. Moves from federal agencies to end programs have shifted the project landscape as well. The current number of impacted projects run by tribes is unknown. According to the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, at least 100 tribes they have worked with have received funds from federal agencies and the Inflation Reduction Act; however, those figures could be higher. “Without that support, most of, if not all of those projects are now at risk for being killed by the new unclear federal approval process,” said John Lewis, the Native American Energy managing director for Avant Energy, a consulting company.
“Some of these projects, at a minimum, have stalled, or they’re having to be reworked in some way to fit within the current parameters that have been laid down by the administration.”
The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, for instance, has planned solar projects reliant on federal tax cuts. The projects were designed to power a community health clinic, schools, and a radio station that broadcasts emergency notices during winter storms. However, with the passage of the OBBB, the tribe must now begin construction by July of next year or lose credits, a feat that doesn’t account for the time it takes to secure capital in various stages, seek a complete environmental review, and navigate long permitting timelines through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“Some of these projects, at a minimum, have stalled, or they’re having to be reworked in some way to fit within the current parameters that have been laid down by the administration,” said Verrin Kewenvoyouma, who is Hopi and Navajo, and a managing partner at Kewenvoyouma Law, a firm that assists tribes with environmental permitting, cultural resources, and energy development. “We have clients that are looking at creative solutions, trying to keep them alive.”
In June, the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan, a joint organization representing 12 federally recognized tribes in the state, joined a class action lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, alongside a tribe in Alaska, arguing that the agency illegally froze access to promised project funds from the Environmental and Climate Justice block grant program. The now-defunct program promised $3 billion to 350 recipients to fund projects addressing pollution and high energy costs. Plaintiffs hope the program will be reinstated so that pending projects can be restarted.
Tribes are now seeking philanthropy, short-term funding, and conventional financing to cover delays and gaps in project costs. After the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians in California lost access to a $3.55 million BIA award to the tribe for solar microgrid development in March, the BQuest Foundation, which specializes in covering expenses needed to continue housing or climate-related projects, gave the tribe $1 million to resume the project’s timeline.
Currently, the self-funded Alliance is covering tribal projects that have experienced a sudden loss in tax credits, rescission of federal funds, and uncertainty of direct pay. “We’re helping try to navigate this challenging period and continue on their self-determined paths, whatever it looks like for them—to energy sovereignty,” said Shéri Smith, CEO of the organization. At the moment, the Alliance is offering a mix of grants from $50 to $500,000 and loans up to $1 million, which will be converted to grants should a tribe default.
“Tribes need to build up internal capacity to carry that out and to have control of their energy situation, for their at-risk members, and members in general,” said John Lewis from Avant Energy. “At such a critical stage, access to affordable, reliable electricity is paramount. The country is getting hotter. The world is getting hotter. It’s warming.”
2025-08-15 00:05:50
We’re well into the second week of the Texas redistricting showdown. Far from home, these Texas Democrats are resolute. In an undisclosed location, I sat down with them to talk about their decision to leave their home state to stand up for democracy.
WATCH:
More than 50 Texas House Democrats fled the state en masse earlier this month, with many holing up with their blue state brethren in Illinois and New York, to block a GOP-led attempt to redraw congressional maps that could yield Republicans up to five additional U.S. House seats—part of a radical Trump-inspired scheme to help Republicans keep control of the US House of Representatives after the 2026 midterm elections.
The current special session of the Texas chamber may adjourn if a quorum isn’t met, but Texas Governor Greg Abbott has vowed to call successive special sessions until the redistricting plan is passed. He’s also signed civil arrest warrants for absent Democrats and invoked a nonbinding opinion from the scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton regarding their possible removal from office; any such action would ultimately require court rulings. My colleague Tim Murphy found one prominent Democrat holed up somewhere outside Chicago last Thursday, just hours after Sen. John Cornyn announced that the Trump administration would assign FBI agents to help “hold these supposed lawmakers accountable.” I explained the basics of the big stand off in a video posted last week:
In the Texas Senate, Democrats also staged a symbolic walkout but failed to break quorum, allowing GOP legislators to advance the redistricting proposal in the chamber. Still, for the map to become law, both the House and Senate must pass it, and the governor must sign it, meaning the standoff continues.
2025-08-14 23:21:03
These days, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is a faithful servant for President Donald Trump, going so far as to cook up a phony intelligence report so Trump’s Justice Department can pursue investigations of his perceived enemies. But not so long ago, Gabbard slammed Trump for being a warmonger supporting a “genocidal war” in order to score billions of dollars in arms sales and for pushing an “insane” policy “to protect al-Qaeda.”
These blistering criticisms of Trump came during the first Trump presidency, when Gabbard was a Democratic House member from Hawaii and a founding fellow of the Bernie Sanders Institute, a nonprofit the socialist senator from Vermont set up after his 2016 presidential campaign to promote progresssive policies. In the fall of 2018, Gabbard, who had supported Sanders’ presidential bid, recorded a video with Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife and a co-founder of the institute, in which she accused Trump of profound perfidy.
Gabbard not only blasted the Trump administration’s policy as misguided; she asserted that Trump was backing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to protect $2 billion in US arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Gabbard excoriated the “disastrous decisions” of the US government that had led to “regime-change wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Referring to the “genocidal war that Saudi Arabia” was then waging in Yemen, she noted that it had created the “worst humanitarian disaster in the world,” and she decried the Trump administration for “standing shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia in this war, as they commit these atrocities against Yemeni civilians.”
Gabbard referred to this conflict as “an illegal war that the United States is waging” with Saudi Arabia. She added that Trump was using US taxpayer dollars to “refuel Saudi planes, to provide precision missiles” that were attacking weddings and school buses. She called for stopping all US military support for Saudi Arabia—a government with which Trump was striving to forge a closer bond.
Gabbard not only blasted the Trump administration’s policy as misguided; she asserted that Trump was backing Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen to protect $2 billion in US arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. She leveled a serious charge at the Trump White House: “These leaders are making decisions for profits on the backs of the lives of these innocent civilians in Yemen. It’s heartbreaking to see how these millions of people’s lives have just been devastated by the continuance of this war.”
Sanders turned the conversation to the ongoing civil war in Syria. Trump had recently threatened to use military force against Russia-backed President Bashir al-Assad if Assad attacked Idlib province, a stronghold of the jihadist opposition, and Gabbard assailed the president for his “beating of the war drums.”
She contended that al-Qaeda controlled Idlib and Trump’s action was a “complete betrayal of the American people, of those who lost their lives on 9/11, of the troops who have been fighting against terrorism and their families.” She said, “It’s insane, frankly, that we would hear these threats coming from the United States president and the commander in chief that they will force ‘dire consequences’ and the use of military force against these other countries to protect al-Qaeda.” (At that point, the largest rebel force in Idlib was a group with historic ties to al-Qaeda.)
Explaining to Sanders why Trump was supposedly protecting al-Qaeda, Gabbard described what was close to a conspiracy theory:
Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this kind of slow, drawn-out regime-change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—these different groups—that have morphed and taken on different names but are essentially all linked with al-Qaeda or [are] al-Qaeda themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government. So President Trump and his war cabinet recognize now that if al-Qaeda is destroyed in Syria, in Idlib, which is kind of their last stand, then that ground force will be gone, and this regime-change war, in effect, will be over.
Gabbard was saying that Trump was purposefully backing what she called al-Qaeda in order to keep the war going in Syria.
Regarding Idlib, Trump’s national security team at that time was concerned that an Assad assault on the province—with the likely support of Russia and Iran—would produce much bloodshed and chaos and cause a massive flow of refugees into Turkey. This flood could include thousands of jihadist fighters who might move to other parts of Europe. Trump’s advisers also feared that Assad in attacking Idlib might once again use chemical weapons.
Gabbard did not address these matters and focused only on her belief that the Trump administration was aligning itself with al-Qaeda to keep alive the war against Assad. She seemed supportive of allowing Bashar to proceed with an assault on Idlib—or not taking steps to prevent him from doing so.
By this point, Gabbard had already positioned herself as an outlier on Syria policy and had been branded an apologist for Assad. She had questioned international findings that Assad had used chemical weapons on civilian targets. And in 2017, she held a secret meeting with him.
This conversation with Sanders was not a one-off. In an interview with the Nation weeks earlier, Gabbard had castigated Trump for protecting “al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces in Syria,” all the while “threatening Russia, Syria, and Iran, with military force if they dare attack these terrorists.” She slapped Trump for acting “as the protective big brother of al-Qaeda and other jihadists.” She painted a dark picture of him:
The president loves being adored and praised, and despite his rants against them, he especially craves the favor of the media. Trump remembers very well that the only times he has been praised almost universally by the mainstream media, Republicans, and Democrats, was when he has engaged in aggressive military actions… Right now, President Trump’s approval ratings are dropping, and he craves positive reinforcement. He and his team are making a political calculation and looking for any excuse or opportunity to launch another military attack, so that Trump can again be glorified for dropping bombs… President Trump and his cabinet of war hawks are concerned that if al-Qaeda is defeated in Idlib, then our regime-change war to overthrow the Syrian government will be over.
During her chat with Jane Sanders, Gabbard, who was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, affirmed Sanders’ calls for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. She bemoaned the nation’s “addiction to fossil fuels.” And when Sanders referred to the “autocratic nature” of Trump, Gabbard nodded along. She also praised the “great work” of the Bernie Sanders Institute.
Mother Jones sent Gabbard a long list of questions about her harsh criticism of Trump’s actions related to Yemen and Syria, her work with the Bernie Sanders Institute, and her support of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. She did not answer any query, but her press secretary at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, emailed, “For a publication that brands itself as ‘investigative’ and pro-peace, your inquiry conveniently ignores everything President Trump and DNI Gabbard, under his leadership, have done to keep Americans safe and advance peace since day one. Shame on you for using cherry picked remarks from seven years ago in a clear attempt to smear them.”
In December 2018, Gabbard was a featured speaker at a conference organized by the Bernie Sanders Institute, and appeared on a panel with actor Susan Sarandon, civil rights activist Ben Jealous, and progressive economist Radhika Balakrishnan. Addressing the topic of environmental justice, she said that “the most basic and fundamental human right is clean air and clean water.” She asked the audience to hold its breath. “You can’t exist for very long without air, ” she remarked.
At this gathering of leftist Democrats and progressives, Gabbard was quite at home. She noted that “so many of the decisions that are being made in regards to policy” were “being driven by greed.” She recounted her participation in the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, South Dakota. She assailed the fossil fuel industry. She noted that economic conditions in Central America were driving people in that region to flee their countries and called for US policies to address that. She urged “economic empowerment” in the United States “based on human rights and needs, not consumerism and greed.”
Two months later, in February 2019, Gabbard announced her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After a year of campaigning, having collected merely two delegates, she withdrew from the race and endorsed Joe Biden, the eventual nominee. Two years later, Gabbard, who had once been a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, left the party—calling it too woke and too hawkish—and endorsed several Trump-backed GOP congressional candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
In August 2024, Gabbard, the onetime progressive House Democrat and Bernie Sanders Institute fellow, endorsed Trump, now claiming he had the “courage” to pursue peace and see “war as a last resort.” His support of Saudi war crimes in Yemen (due to a greedy desire for revenue from arms sales) and his supposed scheming to support al-Qaeda in Syria were memory-holed—as were her previous leftish views on economics, health care, and the environment.
Trump’s current stable of top appointees includes several who were once fierce critics and who dumped their harsh views of Trump in order to serve him. On this roster are Secretary of State Marco Rubio (“a con artist”); Vice President JD Vance (either “a cynical a–hole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler”) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (“a threat to democracy”). But only one of his senior aides previously accused Trump of making common cause with al-Qaeda, betraying the nation, and supporting war crimes for the sake of profits—and that person now comfortably works for Trump and oversees the entire US intelligence community.
2025-08-14 23:11:30
The Trump administration is planning citywide sweeps of dozens of homeless encampments in DC starting tonight, according to city workers and advocacy groups briefed on the plan. In anticipation of the raids, organizations that assist the homeless are hurriedly working to get homeless individuals out of tent encampments before they can be detained or arrested.
“Arrests will occur at night, in an effort to avoid news cameras,” Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director at National Homelessness Law Center, said via email.
“We are working to get our clients out of harm’s way as much as we can, and to monitor whether the actions follow the law.”
The impending crackdown, which local government staff and local and national advocacy groups confirmed to Mother Jones, come less than a week after President Donald Trump wrote on social media this week that the homeless have to “move out, IMMEDIATELY.”
A DC government worker briefed on the plan says law enforcement will target up to 62 different sites across the city, and that land not controlled by the federal government may not be immune from sweeps. (People sleeping in front of churches and businesses may also be targeted, the source says.)
It is unclear whether DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) or federal law enforcement will lead the efforts, or if the National Guard members Trump deployed to the district earlier this week will assist. Neither MPD nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment.
Crucially, advocates point out, there are not enough shelter beds in the nation’s capital to accommodate all of the people who regularly sleep outside. According to a joint press release from the National Homelessness Law Center, the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, and Miriam’s Kitchen, there are currently just 40 shelter beds available and nearly 900 people who may need them.
“We are working to get our clients out of harm’s way as much as we can, and to monitor whether the actions follow the law,” Amber Harding, executive director at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, tells Mother Jones.
