Trump’s attack on the unhoused is nothing new

Bulldozers and backhoes

Hefty bags and all my wet clothes

My broken hearts

Broken limbs and broken toes 

We hold onto whispers of love

Even the smallest crum

Of some-one

i take a hit becuz i think my life

Has long ago stop meaning 

Shit

I grab a few things

I’m so done with all the things 

They swept my home again

Today 

and i’m so tired i just looked up 

And said ok

To the King with his violent orders

Get in line 

Your dukes and gentry 

Have taken everything from us 

Every home, every promise 

Until there is none of us?

Forced locked treatment, incarceration, internment camps…  for the “crime” of homelessness. These aren’t dystopian futures, this is NOW under the most recent executive order by the orange-tinted settler president of occupied Turtle Island.

But wait, he is too late. We are already there. We have been there for a while.

Sick of more sweeps on Sycamore Street 

“Oh no we have nowhere to go, the city promised us housing but we are still out here..,” JJ, a life-long resident of Oakland who after being evicted from her home has lived houselessly on Sycamore street in West Oakland for more than three years, whispered out of her tent to me on Monday, in the midst of CalTrans trucks beeping, bulldozers circling and Hazmat dressed workers sweeping. “Nowhere, she shook her head and then added, “thanks for the conversation.” 

JJ was one of hundreds of residents of Sycamore Street facing immediate removal to nowhere after the seventh sweep of their community ordered by the City of Oakland. 

JJ is just like the hundreds of houseless residents swept and/or towed from East 12th St, from Lake Merritt, from Mosswood Park, and even from the fake, alleged “solution” aka The Cabins created by the City of Oakland to house the Wood Street Community which they violently swept two years ago. The cabin residents were summarily evicted to nowhere earlier this month. Just like the houseless RV dwelling residents of San Francisco. 

This is the daily reality of houseless peoples on stolen indigenous land across occupied Turtle Island since I was a houseless child and young adult in the 1980s and 1990s living on the street with my mama in LA and Oakland and SF and then later as a single mother in the Mission after a gentrification fueled eviction, followed by lengthy homelessness with my family.

The only marked increase in the violence against our houseless bodies is that the sweeps have become more consistent, deadly, and dangerous since a supreme court ruling called Grants Pass v Johnson.

Now we have orders to be disappeared

Since the current bizarre federal administration took, the crackdown has included indigenous children and families routinely and brutally kidnapped off the streets by masked gun-toting maniacs known as ICE and DHS, which simulated the original days of settler occupation and genocide of First Peoples of this land, and chattel slavery of peoples from Mama Africa. Now the new settler president has now turned his evil gaze at us houseless people. 

Oddly, for people who follow history, this current evil colonizer is following the playbook to the T of his cartoonishly evil predecessors, Joe Arpaio and Rudy Giuliani, with starter hate and fascist policies towards Black and Brown peoples from other sides of the false borders, then using very similar removal policies on houseless residents of their settler towns. 

The current colonial president’s executive order implements and enhances the policies put it into place by neo-liberal Demicons like Govenor Gavin Newsom since the terrifying court ruling that houseless people were no longer afforded rights under the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

Trump’s claim that he would withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” and/or settler towns that don’t “sweep everyone off the streets immediately” was the same as Newsom’s actions when he immediately implemented the Grants Pass decree by stating that he would withhold funding from cities if they didn’t enforce mandatory sweeps and clean-ups of houseless communities. Newsom also in March of 2024 created Prop 1 which implements forced treatment of houseless, disabled residents. And 20 years earlier, he came into the office of Mayor of San Francisco on the backs of “cleaning up the homeless problem” and implemented Care Not Cash.

Last year, Oakland Mayor Sheng Tao one-upped Newsom and said she was coming with the bulldozers and backhoes for all the houseless communities in “her city,” even though she came into office claiming her stint  as a houseless mother.

The mayor of San Jose said that he would arrest anyone who refused a shelter bed and was houseless in “his city.” SF Mayor Daniel Lurie made it illegal to sleep in your own RV. Fresno put a new law on their already stacked anti-poor people books that made it illegal to be houseless in public or when… well you get it.

So Trump, get in line with your anti-poor people hate, you ain’t doing anything we haven’t already dealt with. You are late to the hate party,just enhancing the hate, digging it in, manifesting the worst parts of the hell we are already living through. 

The resistance

We are already resisting and fighting and marching against and protesting and liberating every day, from Turtle Island to Palestine. We are also building.

As sick and terrifying as this all is, warriors have resisted this hate. People didn’t just stay silent while indigenous families and children were kidnapped, people resisted from Tovaangar (LA) to Wampanoag (Boston) to Duwamish (Seattle) lands. Revolutionary lawyers leveraged their judicial privilege and fought in the courts and the sick ICE had to retreat—so at least for one day it was a little less terrifying for indigenous people to walk the LA streets. We hope to find some lawyers to do the same for houseless peoples in this moment as he implements his new “orders.”

In our collective horror from the Grants Pass decision, we also created art. Artists like Art Hazelwood from Western Regional Advocacy Project, ceremonies and street vigils for relatives killed in sweeps. Documentaries like the one coming out from Wood Street Commons about their violent evictions. With my family at of fellow houseless artists and cultural workers at POOR Magazine and the Po Poets Project I created an acclaimed stage play Crushing Wheelchairs which has now been adapted into a powerful feature length film of the same name with an all houseless/formerly houseless cast, focused on the human stories behind these violent system that builds homelessness and our stories of resistance and survival through the violence of sweeping peoples like we are trash, which is being released this year. 

And although these wins don’t end the sick hate and settler violence from Palestine to Turtle Island and the genocide continues, no one is safe until we all safe, we  people across Mama Earth continue to fight and march  and scream and walk. 

This is the time to lift up self-determined solutions more than ever. This is the time to turn towards each other. To get stronger in our resolve. To vision and act and liberate and activate solutions led by us poor and indigenous, disabled, houseless people even more. 

These are lies (laws) built on a system born of hate, removal, theft, and murder. We have solutions built in love and liberation. Solutions like Homefulness, Wood Street Commons, Aetna Street Solidarity, SHARE /WHEEL, The Bank of ComeUnity Reparations, Reclaiming Homes.These are all systems of care not built from hate or politricks but by the people for the people. Poor people.

Any lawyers who are willing to step to this impending worsening crisis please contact poormag@gmail.com. Come thru for benefit screenings of the trailer of Crushing Wheelchairs this Saturday at Swim Gallery at 509 Ellis st in SF and at ATA later in the month so we can raise the money to release this powerful no-budget film.