Nearly a year to the day after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a new, get-tough stance on homelessness in California, President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order that echoes the governor’s approach.
On Thursday, July 24, Trump signed the “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” order, which pushes local and state governments to make it illegal for people to sleep outside, forcibly commit people with serious mental illnesses or drug addiction issues and pulls funding from local and state governments that don’t go along with the approach.
“Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe. The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded,” the order reads in part. “The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both. Nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having regularly used hard drugs like methamphetamines, cocaine, or opioids in their lifetimes.”
Federal and state governments have spent “tens of billions” of dollars on the problem, the executive order continues, addressing homelessness “but not its root causes.”
The language in Trump’s order echoes what Newsom — whom Trump has publicly feuded with for years — said on July 25, 2024.
“The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets. There are simply no more excuses,” Newsom said in a news release issued by his office. “It’s time for everyone to do their part.”
Newsom directed state agencies to adopt policies for clearing encampments on state property. Local agencies were “encouraged” to do the same. The order noted the state has provided “historic investments and intervention programs” to address homelessness.
Newsom’s statement followed a June 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision, City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, which allowed local governments to arrest people sleeping in public, even when there are no shelter spaces available for them to go to instead.
Trump’s order splits from Newsom’s directive in one key area. The Trump administration will also seek to end programs to make low-income housing more affordable — widely seen as a key element in fighting homelessness — in favor of programs that focus on “treatment, recovery and self-sufficiency.”
Local response
Inland Empire governments are mixed in their response to Trump’s new directive.
“The county plans to examine the order and determine if there are local impacts,” San Bernardino County spokesperson David Wert wrote in an email. “In the meantime, the county will continue working with our community partners on our effective efforts to reduce homelessness and create successful alternatives to makeshift encampments.”
San Bernardino County has been expanding the housing it offers to local homeless residents. The county broke ground on the next phase of its Pacific Village campus in June. When completed, it is expected to offer 106 beds for homeless residents.
Riverside County, meanwhile, pushed back on Trump’s attempt to dump funding to house the homeless.
“Riverside County reaffirms that the most effective way to address homelessness and promote public safety is through a compassionate, coordinated, and evidence-based system of care,” Tanya Torno, Riverside County’s Deputy Director of Homeless Services, wrote in a written statement.
“In Riverside County, we have built such a system connecting people to behavioral health, substance use treatment, and other critical supports,” she continued. “Our commitment to person-centered approaches is showing results: through the implementation of our Homeless Action Plan and the expansion of our mental health and housing systems, we’ve achieved a 19% reduction in unsheltered homelessness in the 2025 Point in Time Count.”
And Tomo said, the county has no plans to change direction.
“We will continue to serve people well in Riverside County,” she wrote. “That means meeting people where they are through multidisciplinary outreach, rapid rehousing, and supportive housing and working with federal, state, and local partners to expand access to care and strengthen our regional infrastructure.”
The city of San Bernardino also questioned Trump’s approach.
“Shifting homeless individuals suffering from mental health or drug dependency issues to institutional settings would require an infrastructure that does not currently exist in California,” city spokesperson Jeff Kraus wrote in an email.
“The order also ends the federal funding of Housing First-type solutions in which an individual is provided short-term housing in order to provide the stability in their lives needed to address their specific cause of homelessness,” Kraus said. “We have seen this method work for many individuals, including families, looking for a pathway to leave the streets.”
But, Kraus noted, current approaches to help those with mental health or substance abuse issues has been “mixed at best.” He expressed hope that the new Trump directive would mean more money to help those groups.
A disability rights group is also raising the alarm about Trump’s new executive order.
“This order explicitly calls for the unraveling of decades of established civil rights protections for people with disabilities, including the 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. (Lois Curtis) Supreme Court ruling that requires states to end unnecessary segregation of people with disabilities and instead to provide supportive services in the most integrated setting appropriate to peoples’ needs,” a statement released by Disability Rights California on Friday reads in part.
Trump’s order to take away funding from programs that use a Housing First model of addressing homelessness and the harm-reduction model of addressing drug addiction is the wrong approach, the group said.
“Instead of providing housing and supports to people in need, the Trump administration directs states and local governments to weaponize their resources to drive unhoused people into locked institutions against their will,” the DRC statement reads in part. The executive order suggests ‘shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings,’ ” the DRC noted.
That these policies echo Newsom’s directions over the past year isn’t lost on the DRC.
“California policymakers, led by Gov. Newsom, continue to react to very real problems with policies that ignore root causes and instead focus on clearing from public view and locking up people with disabilities, people in poverty, and any found ‘undesirable,’ ” the group’s statement reads in part. Trump’s order “makes clear the priorities and the future they are steering toward — one in which the programs that have been most effective in providing care and stability are eliminated and the most vulnerable of our friends, family and neighbors are disposed of in jails, psychiatric hospitals, and detention centers.”
With 3,990 residents lacking permanent shelter in Riverside County, about 157 people of every 100,000 county residents are homeless, based on the Point in Time Count conducted in January.
In San Bernardino County, with 3,821 homeless residents, about 172 of every 100,000 residents are homeless.
In comparison, in 2024, about 455 people per 100,000 California residents and 195 people per 100,000 U.S. residents were homeless. More than one-third of all homeless people in the U.S. live in California.
Point in Time Count data is used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to distribute funding for programs to combat homelessness and to measure the effectiveness of efforts to reduce homelessness nationwide.