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Three days into the Trump administration's seizure of law enforcement in the District, the city's unhoused population has already seen federal agents entering camp sites and asking residents if they have drugs or weapons, three unsheltered people told The Washington Post.
Many others among the more than 5,000 people in D.C. without current permanent shelter said they had heard about President Donald Trump's calls to clear encampments with increased law enforcement and "immediately" move their occupants out of the District. They expressed fear and anxiety over what could happen - and where they might go. At the same time, the White House has doubled down on its rhetoric targeting the city's unsheltered.
"Homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment, to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday. "And if they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time."
The city's homeless advocates have come out against the Trump administration's law enforcement effort, arguing that increased policing is not a long-term solution.
"The removal of our unhoused neighbors from public spaces without offering them stable housing first is not the solution," said Adam Rocap, deputy CEO and chief strategy officer of Miriam's Kitchen, a nonprofit that provides outreach services to people without shelter. "It does not address the real issue: the lack of affordable housing and access to the support services that people need to maintain their homes."
"We also want to make D.C. safe and beautiful," Leavitt said Tuesday. "That involves removing mentally disturbed individuals and homeless encampments as well. So we will be using these regulations and code that already exist to clean up our streets. And we've already had great success."
According to Leavitt, 70 homeless encampments have been removed from National Park Service land since March. The Park Service did not respond to questions about which encampments were cleared and how many people were removed. It's unclear whether there have been any arrests of unsheltered individuals this week by federal or District officials.
During a Twitter Live chat Tuesday evening, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and other members of the D.C. government said that the city's homeless population has decreased since last year and that the city is reaching out to people still living on the street.
"We spend a lot of time and resources trying to get the people who are in encampments into shelter," Bowser said.
Many of the dozen or so unsheltered men and women who spoke with The Post this week described a confusing new reality.
"Nobody's telling us anything," said Albenny Morales, 46, an unhoused man staying outside the Martin Luther King Jr. library in downtown D.C. "What are they going to do? Arrest us all and put us in mental institutions?"
At a breakfast distribution site off North Capitol Street, Frederick Walker, 44, stood nearby and considered the White House's plans.
"Shelters get full every night," he said. "They fill up by 7 or 8, and if you're not in, you're on the street. Does that mean you're fair game to get arrested?"
On Tuesday morning, a prescheduled cleanup of a homeless encampment in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood went forward as planned, with outreach workers, D.C. police, and Health and Human Services providers convening at the intersection of Virginia Avenue NW and Rock Creek Parkway.
Only three residents were living at the site near the Watergate, and they quickly left the area as the cleanup began. City workers fed trash, tarps, tent poles and other items into three city garbage trucks parked in the grassy area. HHS staff on-site declined to comment, as did outreach workers from Miriam's Kitchen.
D.C. Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage said there was "currently shelter space in D.C. for anyone who wants to come inside," adding that there are more than 1,100 beds for single adults across the city's shelter system.
But advocates say many of those beds are already spoken for, and some unsheltered individuals do not feel safe in a crowded shelter.
"The 1,000 beds the District is talking about are already full," said Jesse Rabinowitz, a spokesperson for the National Homelessness Law Center. "In a traditional shelter, you get priority for the bed if you slept there the previous night."
The city's homeless population has decreased over the years. According to the 2025 Point-In-Time count, the annual federally mandated census of people without housing, there were 5,138 unhoused individuals in shelters and sleeping on the streets in 2025, a 9 percent drop from the previous year and a 19 percent drop since 2020, when 6,380 people were without shelter in Washington.
Among the District's responses to the issue have been encampment cleanups. The clearings are "triggered when a site presents a security, health, or safety risk, and/or interferes with community use of such places," according to the city's website.
A running list of recent and planned encampment clearances maintained by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services has included at least 50 distinct addresses since February, though many are clustered around a highway overpass connecting Foggy Bottom to Georgetown.
The majority of encampments cleared by the District's teams - which include outreach workers, police officers and public works crews - were in Ward 2, which includes the central business district, the White House and Foggy Bottom, and Ward 6, which includes many downtown areas, such as Penn Quarter and Gallery-Place Chinatown. Some encampments have been cleared multiple times in the past six months.
District officials have emphasized that during clearings, outreach workers offer connections to shelters, transitional housing and behavioral health services to people they encounter.
The schedule lists five more encampments for clearance this month, including a camp along an abandoned rail line in Northeast Washington and a 10-foot stretch of sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue SE occupied by a single man and his belongings.
The Northeast Washington location, tucked in a thicket of trees, is currently home to about a dozen people. On Tuesday morning, a few residents of the encampment sat in folding chairs in the parking lot of a gas station at the bottom of the embankment.
Darrell Hopkins, a 54-year-old lifelong D.C. resident, has camped along the tracks for the past six years. He said a team from the deputy mayor's office stopped by earlier this summer to give notice of plans to clear the encampment; the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services website lists plans to clear the site in late August.
"They can't make me leave D.C.," Hopkins said. "I'll just find some other woods."
More than 50 local and national groups that advocate for and provide services to the unhoused joined a conference call Monday to brainstorm and coordinate a response to the White House's crackdown.
Donald Whitehead, the executive director for the National Coalition for the Homeless, said Tuesday that his group and others are setting up hotlines to allow people to report encampment clearings by federal officers and offer homeless individuals a way to reach out for help, as well as working to find ways to open up emergency shelter beds - in churches and places of worship and in coordination with nonprofits that typically step up to help in cold-weather months when sleeping outside can be deadly.
"We have to create a bridge that gets us to the end of this 30-day period," Whitehead said. "Mental health facilities, substance abuse facilities, homeless shelters, they're all full. So we're seeing what we can do to find more space. It's not a sustainable plan, and it doesn't solve homelessness. But we have to do something."
Whitehead said plans are still coming together. But advocates say they believe that the stepped-up law enforcement approach to homelessness underway in D.C. could happen elsewhere.
"The next 30 days will give us some valuable information as to what might happen in these other cities," Whitehead said.
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