The Presidency

D.C. speeds up clearing homeless encampment after Trump notice

By Meagan Flynn, Kyle Swenson & Peter Hermann The Washington Post (TNS)

Published March 7, 2025

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D.C. work crews began clearing a homeless encampment Thursday morning near the E Street Expressway, hours after President Donald Trump warned Mayor Muriel E. Bowser in a post on Truth Social that she must either clear the "unsightly" tents, or federal officials "will be forced to do it for her."

D.C. had already planned to clear 10 encampments across the city between Feb. 27 and March 13, a city spokeswoman said. But the mayor accelerated efforts at one of those locations, by the E Street Expressway near the Virginia Avenue NW, after a phone call with the Trump administration Wednesday.

"We responded to the location identified," Bowser said at a news conference Thursday morning.

In response to questions, she said that she did not consider the call from the administration official to be an order or directive, only a notification, and that she did not make an agreement.

"I said 'Thanks for the notice - we'll take care of it.'"

Since Trump took office, Bowser has sought to be more cooperative with the new administration in finding areas of common ground, and Trump's call on the mayor to clean up encampments is perhaps the most public test yet of that dynamic. The president has long fixated on quality-of-life issues, including homelessness, graffiti and crime, and repeatedly threatened to take over the District, leading Bowser to take a more strategic approach to their relationship compared with his first term.

This week, the White House shelved an executive order that would have cracked down on those issues in D.C., The Washington Post reported Wednesday. The change followed weeks of "constructive conversations" between Bowser and Trump officials, according to a senior Trump administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. Bowser separately said Tuesday that the city would paint a new mural over Black Lives Matter Plaza after Republican threats to cut transportation funding.

In his Truth Social post, Trump called on the mayor to clear all encampments but specifically referenced sites near the State Department - such as on E Street - and White House.

"If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her! Washington, D.C. must become CLEAN and SAFE!" Trump posted. "We want to be proud of our Great Capital again. Thank you Mayor Bowser for your efforts on behalf of the Citizens of our Country. Hopefully you will be successful!"

Bowser said that the administration was "not ordering us to do anything," stressing that the District already had robust plans to clean up encampments.

"We always clear homeless encampments," Bowser said. "We always do, and we do it according to protocols that have worked in the District that won't have the effect of just moving people around, but trying to get them housed."

The encampment along the expressway consists of several clusters of tents roughly between 20th and 23rd streets NW. City spokeswoman Susana Castillo said that the city had been planning to clear it since Jan. 29 but delayed plans due to inclement weather, only to accelerate them after the Trump administration's notice.

Within hours of the Trump administration's Wednesday call to Bowser, city crews arrived at the encampment to tell residents they had to be out by the next day, according to two people who live there.

By 10 a.m. Thursday, a half-dozen city workers from the Department of Behavioral Health were at the tents clustered together at the green space running along the expressway. They referred a reporter to direct all questions to the mayor's office. Seventeen tents stood in the grass, four of which had been already taken down by their owners.

A woman who declined to give her name was packing up her tent. "Nobody is helping me," she said.

Another woman, who also declined to give her name, sat inside a green tent as morning traffic bolted by along D Street NW. She said she had been living at the encampment for a few months. "People do not have places to go. Some people have been out here for a very long time," she said.

Shelley Byars has been chronically homeless in D.C. for three years. Originally from Texas, the 47-year-old was among the residents removed from McPherson Square when the District cleared that encampment in 2023. She has bounced from location to location since and landed at the E Street encampment in July.

Byars said she only heard about the clearing Thursday morning from a city worker. "Now we only have less than 24 hours to get out," she said, as she threw clothing out of her tent. "I liked it right here. They keep shoving us off from place to place and making it so we don't have anywhere to go."

In a statement, Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor of D.C.'s health and human services, said that the city's case management teams will work to match people with housing and wraparound services, including behavioral health.

"The safest place for people is in a shelter or permanent housing," Turnage said. "Our primary focus is always working to move people experiencing homelessness into safer shelters or housing."

Scott Schenkelberg, president and CEO of Miriam's Kitchen, a nonprofit that provides services for the homeless, said it was unclear to him whether the city followed proper protocols in this encampment clearing. Encampment residents are supposed to be given two weeks' notice, but some at the site said they had only learned about the action within the past 24 hours.

Schenkelberg said that encampment clearings only make it more difficult for advocates to connect the homeless with housing. One outreach worker from the nonprofit was on-site during the clearing this morning.

"Really all you're doing by closing an encampment - unless there are obvious health and safety reasons to close an encampment - is hiding a problem and further causing trauma to the people living in the encampments," Schenkelberg said.

"We get people housed very regularly," he said. "It just takes time. Moving people around makes it take that much longer."

City officials have tried for years to curb homeless encampments and get unhoused people into shelters or housing. The number of people living on the street or in temporary shelter in the region has increased 12 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to latest point-in-time count, an annual census of unsheltered individuals across the United States. The District was among the areas with the largest increase last year, with more than 5,600 on the street or in temporary shelters.

Turnage said that the city has cut the number of tents in half over the past two years. Some tent encampments are on federal park land. Bowser said at the news conference that the administration is aware of that, but she added, "We're still here to help."