Authorities have begun sweeping potentially dozens of homeless encampments in northwestern Washington as part of President Trump’s sprawling takeover of the city’s law enforcement apparatus.
City officials and advocates for the homeless had spent much of Thursday working ahead of a federal operation that had been expected to start at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, urging people in encampments to go to shelters.
“The District has worked proactively with homeless residents ahead of these actions to provide services and offers of shelter,” read a statement from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. “DC will support the engagements with wraparound services and trash pickup, but the planned engagements are otherwise the purview of the federal agencies.”
Charles Allen, a member of the D.C. council, said city officials had explained to the council that the operation would target about 25 sites in the city’s northwest quadrant, starting around 6:30 p.m. Otherwise, he said, “it is very unclear to us” what the operation entailed and that no one from the White House had reached out.
A little after 6 p.m. there were signs that the effort was underway, with city police gathering at an area outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where homeless people often spend the night. Most of the homeless had already departed when police arrived, leaving behind belongings in piles on the sidewalk.
Local police referred inquiries about the operation to the White House, which had not replied to questions.
There was widespread uncertainty about the scope of the sweeps on Thursday, even as there was little surprise that they were coming. In announcing that he was federalizing the D.C. police force on Monday, Mr. Trump had said the city was being taken over by “drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” and in an executive order in March he had demanded the “prompt removal and cleanup of all homeless or vagrant encampments.” Many, but not all, of the encampments are on parks, traffic circles and medians in D.C. that are federal government property.
While the president said that the authorities would give homeless people “places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday that their options would be “to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services, and, if they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time.”
It was unclear what the charges would be for any arrests. The city’s locally elected attorney general posted legal guidance for people living in homeless encampments who may be confronted by law enforcement.
The city has not been able to expand mental health capacity, in part because of $1.1 billion that Congress prevented D.C. from accessing in the budget this year, Mr. Allen, the councilman, said.
City agencies have set up extra shelter beds, announcing on social media that “there is currently shelter space available for anyone who wants to come inside and the district can increase that capacity as needed.”
But Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center, a legal advocacy group, said there are not nearly enough beds to take in the hundreds of people living outside in D.C. “There’s nowhere for people to go,” he said.
He also pointed out, echoing Mr. Allen, that “the federal government has not supplied any additional shelter beds.”
Wayne Turnage, deputy mayor for health and human services in Washington, said in an interview on WUSA9, the local CBS affiliate, on Thursday that the Trump administration wants to “finish the encampment part of this process in a week or so.”
He called it an “aggressive timeline” if federal agents were looking to clear 62 encampments on both district and federal sites. “That’s a population that is very challenging to deal with and to do it respectfully and humanely, it will take some time,” he said.
Chris Cameron, Darren Sands and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting from Washington. Ashley Ahn contributed from New York.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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