President Donald Trump said that he may reopen previously shuttered “insane asylums” as part of his crime crackdown.
Reporter Reagen Reese floated the idea during a Monday interview with Trump for the Tucker Carlson-founded news outlet Daily Caller. “Would you be open to the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness?” Reese asked. “Yeah, I would,” Trump responded.
“What happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it, you know, it’s massively expensive,” Trump said.
“They were all over New York,” Trump added, “They had a place, Creedmoor, they had a lot of them, Bellevue, and they were closed by a certain governor. And I remember when they did, it was a long time ago, and I said, ‘They didn’t release these people?’ And they did. They released them into society, and that’s what you have. It’s a rough, it’s a rough situation.”
However, contrary to Trump’s claims, the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center is still operational, as is New York’s Bellevue Hospital.
Creedmoor, Bellevue, the New York Office of Mental Health, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since the 1950s, the federal and New York state governments began defunding mental health services and shuttering mental hospitals, starting a decades-long process of deinstitutionalization, which ramped up in the 1970s amid the financial crisis imposed by stagflation.
Under financial pressure and complaints of poor conditions, many mental hospitals closed, and many patients were released. Between 1965 and 1990, the population of residents in public mental hospitals dropped from around 500,000 to under 100,000. However, those held under court order were transferred to other facilities, including prisons.
Trump has blamed homeless populations for making cities unsafe as he adopts a tough-on-crime stance. On Aug. 11, Trump ordered state and federal officials to crack down on homeless encampments in the nation’s capital. The order came after Trump observed homeless people on the way to his golf course, per photos he posted on his Truth Social account on Aug. 10.
Sweeps of homeless encampments are just one arm of Trump’s messy, multi-pronged attack on crime in D.C., where he has mobilized the National Guard.
Trump’s Monday comments on housing the homeless in mental institutions echo the rhetoric adopted by New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In 2022, Adams announced plans to involuntarily hospitalize homeless individuals deemed unfit to care for themselves. Experts in homelessness and mental health pushed back on Adams’ proposal, claiming that he had wrongfully scapegoated New York’s most vulnerable populations and failed to sufficiently fund mental health resources to address the problem he was aiming to tackle.
A City Council report released this year suggested that Adams’ aggressive plan has been largely ineffective and has unfairly targeted homeless people of color.
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