For some 15 years, David Brown had made a home in Washington Circle, living in a tent with a handful of others in an encampment. On Friday, that home was destroyed — his tent, clothing and other possessions were tossed into a dumpster by police officers carrying out President Trump’s crackdown on some of the city’s most powerless residents.
Left with a fraction of his things, Mr. Brown and his 6-month-old puppy, Molly, moved a block away and slept outside the Foggy Bottom subway station. Sitting in a wheelchair outside the station on Saturday, he was still baffled at what was happening. “Why is he doing this, for no reason?” he asked of Mr. Trump.
The clearing of homeless people off the streets of Washington, part of the president’s marshaling of federal forces on the nation’s capital, has been more scattered than sweeping, and it is unclear how many of the estimated 900 people who sleep on the city’s streets have been affected.
But what emerged over the weekend were more stories like Mr. Brown’s. Many people are on the move, seeing their lives uprooted and their futures become even more precarious, whether as a result of force or out of fear.
Some have moved into shelters. Others have secured temporary hotel rooms with the help of nonprofit groups. Some have taken buses to surrounding areas, or are using donated metro cards to ride the subways back and forth at night. Still others have simply moved to another spot on the streets.
David Beatty, who was removed from an encampment between the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute for Peace, said he spent the first night after being cleared out behind bushes near the Foggy Bottom subway station. But without his tent or foam mat, he was getting little sleep. His other belongings had been put into storage, thanks to the Georgetown Ministry Center — but he kept his broom and dustpan, which he carried with him as he walked around the city during the day, sweeping up cigarette butts and litter.
Making the city safe and beautiful includes “removing mentally disturbed individuals and homeless encampments,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a news conference last week. The White House also said that scores of homeless encampments have been cleared since the president issued an executive order in March that included creating a program to beautify the district. His supporters, including Scott Turner, the housing secretary, say the president’s measures have been needed to rid the city of blight.
Mr. Trump has claimed on social media that authorities would give homeless people somewhere to stay far from the capital, and Ms. Leavitt said they would be offered shelters or addiction and mental health services.
But advocates for homeless people say no federal aid to get them help has materialized.
“Precisely zero resources — no money, no vacant federal buildings, no housing — have come from the federal government to support moving people inside,” Amber W. Harding, the executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said in a statement.
Organizations that provide support in the region estimate that several hundreds of people in Washington remain without a place to sleep. They also said that news of the clearings had driven fear through homeless communities even though the moves may not have displaced huge numbers of people. The district does not have large encampments similar to ones in other big cities.
Homelessness was a vexing problem for the district well before Mr. Trump’s crackdown. Mayor Muriel Bowser made the issue a focus of her administration when she took office in 2015, vowing to end long-term homelessness in the district and make it a “rare, brief and nonrecurring experience” by 2020.
Advocates say those goals are far from being met and that the district’s latest budget for 2026 will undermine the social safety net for the neediest. While city data shows that the number of homeless people in the city dropped by 9 percent over the past year, it had been rising for two years before that.
The city acknowledges that more work needs to be done but points to the decrease over the past year as evidence of progress. It says it has expanded its shelter system and that one of its programs has diverted nearly 400 people from entering homelessness.
Still, the sudden disruption of the past week has left city workers and volunteers scrambling to assemble a patchwork safety net.
Claire Wilson, the executive director of Georgetown Ministry Center, said that close to a dozen of the more than 60 individuals her organization sees on a regular basis were displaced on Friday. It was done without warning, she said, which was out of the norm.
Ms. Wilson added that on Saturday morning, more than 50 people came to the center for shelter — a much larger crowd than what the ministry typically sees on a Saturday.
“Yesterday was frantic — and traumatic,” said Ms. Wilson, talking about Friday. She added that it was unlike any other crisis she had seen homeless individuals face in about a decade of working on housing issues.
On Friday night, as federal and local law enforcement patrolled the streets of Washington, advocates for the homeless were roaming transit hubs in Montgomery County, Md., wealthy suburbs that border of Washington, searching for unhoused people who had left the city.
John Mendez, Bethesda Cares’s executive director, and Renee Siepierski, the group’s street outreach program director, drove to Chevy Chase, a wealthy enclave on the northwest border of Washington. They pulled on bright orange wind breakers and walked the hollow concrete transit hubs in the area, tucked away behind luxury retail stores and bars.
Mr. Mendez anticipated that some of Washington’s homeless would seek refuge by blending in at libraries and coffee shops during the day and on public transit at night. But they were unlikely to permanently leave the city they called home, Mr. Mendez said.
He counted four people who appeared to be homeless, which he said was a higher than usual number. They were laden with bags of belongings. Some of them took a pair of new socks he offered them. They all climbed onto a bus back to Washington that pulled away just before midnight.
In Bethesda, Md., Erica Jones got off a bus from the city. She said she did not have a place to live but relied on the generosity of friends and family. On Friday night, she was heading to her mother’s apartment in Silver Spring, Md.
Ms. Jones said her friends and acquaintances, who are homeless, were intimidated by the number of law enforcement in the streets. And she was alarmed by the way people are being treated.
“These are people like me and people like you,” she said, adding later, “That’s just where they sleep.”
Anushka Patil is a Times reporter covering breaking and developing news around the world.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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