The law was not meant to criminalize homelessness, she said, and came from a place of compassion. But Forrest Gilmore, the executive director of antipoverty nonprofit Beacon, thinks the law is “lazy.” “It pushes all the costs down to the city and county and the local police departments and local jail and doesn’t do anything to address the shelter gap or the housing gap,” Gilmore said.
![Portrait of Robert Tracy [Photo courtesy Jarod Brackens]](https://ableist.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IMG_1003-e1765991437121-300x200.jpeg)
“When I started going to Tarrant County College, I was afraid to tell people that I was homeless,” Tracy said. “Because they would grab their purse or their wallet or their books or whatever, thinking that I was going to rob them.”
After shocking many by saying mentally ill homeless people should be put to death, Fox News morning host Brian Kilmeade apologized on Sunday for what he called an “extremely callous remark.”
As of now, the Massachusetts EA program is like someone giving a homeless person food or money and recording the good deed to post online for clicks. The intent is there but the execution is not. The aforementioned bill correctly positions the intent of helping homeless families with the help itself.
Osha Neumann — a civil and constitutional rights attorney and board member of Where Do We Go? — said it was “disturbing” reading Newsom’s announcement to clear the encampments. He said what homeless people need the most is “a place to go.”
Reagan-era policies of welfare retrenchment and the War on Drugs targeted a different generation of primarily young Black men to fill the void left after one carceral system (the asylum) closed down and another (prisons and jails) expanded.