Following President Donald Trump’s July executive order, the country has undergone a major shift in how it can deal with visible homelessness.
HUD Secretary pursues a “paradigm shift” with a homeless approach
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner has promoted the “paradigm shift” in the Trump administration’s approach to homelessness.
Scripps News
The Fox News host apologized after saying that homeless people who refused help should be executed by the government.
Brian Kilmeade made his original comment on September 10th. Kilmead and colleagues from Fox & Friends were talking about the August 22 murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zaltzka in Charlotte, North Carolina.
When the co-host said that mentally ill and homeless people should be more aggressively detained and forced to treat them, Kilmeade added:
Speaking about Fox on September 14th, Kilmeade apologized for what he called “ruthless” remarks.
“I obviously know that all mentally disabled homeless people act like they did in North Carolina, and so many homeless people deserve our empathy and compassion,” he said.
The United States is undergoing a major shift in how it deals with visible homelessness following President Donald Trump’s order that service providers receiving federal funds must first focus on locking people with drug and mental health challenges.
Trump has long criticised how the US manages homelessness, claiming that public roads are not safe for either homeless or residents. The president deployed National Guard, in part, in Washington, D.C., to eliminate homeless encampments in the city.
“To entrust our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is a lack of compassion for the homeless and other citizens,” Trump said in an order on July 24th that changes federal approaches to homelessness. “The federal government and states have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on failed programs dealing with homelessness, not the root cause, and other citizens are vulnerable to public safety threats.”
Conservatives often complain that homeless services have cost billions of dollars over decades, but providers point out that buckets are falling compared to what they need. They also suggest that such complaints do not have a nuanced understanding that the majority of people are temporarily homeless and not suffering from mental illness or drug use, and that the best way to end homelessness is to help people get home.
Rep. Don Bayer, a Democrat who represents Northern Virginia, is called Kilmeade’s original comment “Illness.” Other liberal critics pointed out that while conservatives are angry at those who celebrated Kirk’s death, Kilmeade receives little criticism for calling for the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.
“The homeless population in America includes over a million children and tens of thousands of veterans, many of whom were in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Beyer posted on social media. “No one deserves to be killed by the government because of mental illness or poverty.”
Last year, an annual national rating found that around 770,000 people experienced homelessness in one night in January. That number still evacuates 5,200 people living in hotels and shelters, and the 2023 Maui wildfires.
