The lights of half a dozen police cars bounced off buildings and the faces of 50 or so homeless adults as federal and D.C. officers lined up outside New York Avenue Presbyterian Church two blocks east of the White House.
Joyce Baucom leaned on her metal cane, knees still unsteady from a double replacement years earlier, and ducked under a tree to shelter from the rain.
Her 5-year-old Chihuahua-pit bull mix, Lil Mama, barked at nearby police officers until her body quaked.
Baucom and her 40-year-old son have been living on the streets for about a year, most recently near the church, a longtime safe harbor that serves the nearly 800 people living unsheltered on the streets of the nation’s capital, according to an annual count by the city. That night, a week into President Donald Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in the District, no one would be allowed to sleep nearby.
“You’re going to have to remove your things, okay?” a city worker told the crowd.
Lil Mama’s barks grew louder.
“Right now!” another city worker yelled over the dog.
The clearing that took place outside the church Aug. 18 was one of 50 that White House officials said this week have been executed by multiagency teams since Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C. on Aug. 11, ordered federal agents to patrol the streets and warned unhoused residents that they “have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.”
Trump’s scrutiny of street homelessness in the District has mobilized advocates, community members and even D.C. officials to open up additional shelter beds. But for many unhoused Washingtonians, the federal crackdown this month has felt more like a continuation of Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s years-long push to remove visible homelessness from the city’s downtown — only now at an accelerated pace and backed by federal manpower.
The president’s crusade has crashed against the same reality that for years has derailed attempts to solve the city’s homelessness crisis: There are not enough services, subsidies or beds to house the thousands of adults and children in the District without permanent housing. Men and women pushed out of encampments by federal law enforcement this month told The Washington Post they have scrambled to find somewhere else to go. Some spent a night or two in a hotel, others in an emergency room. But most simply picked up their belongings and moved to another street corner, another patch of trees, another neighborhood, where they hoped federal agents would pass them by.
Baucom, a D.C. native and former custodian who spent years cleaning government buildings, has passed many nights along with her son and Lil Mama outside the church on New York Avenue — sometimes sleeping right on the concrete steps. The church is a day center for the unsheltered, a place where people can find regular meals, bathrooms, showers and case workers. But when the doors close at 5 p.m., many spend their nights in nearby alleys, on park benches or the church’s small triangle of grass.
As officers closed in around her, Baucom raised her voice to be heard over Lil Mama’s barking.
“Why y’all not giving me housing or putting me up in a hotel?” she said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
By the time the Trump administration directed law enforcement to remove homeless people from the nation’s capital, many of the District’s most prominent encampments had long been cleared by city or federal officials.
Since 2021, hundreds of homeless people have been forced to pack up and leave amid widespread clearings that dismantled the largest tent encampments in D.C. — under the NoMa overpass, on New Jersey Avenue, in parks near Union Station and blocks away from the White House — as well as countless small ones that consisted of one or two tents. D.C. officials have said the large encampments were unsanitary and made passersby and nearby business owners feel unsafe.
But forcing homeless individuals to move from site to site impedes their ability to get help and get housed, advocates and caseworkers have said. Belongings, important documents and even phones can get lost in the shuffle of an eviction. Moving to a different part of the city can mean crossing into the jurisdiction of a different nonprofit and force a restart of the outreach process with new case managers.
Shelley Byars, 47, has lived in nearly a dozen spots around the District in the past two years.
Although she has been approved for the Permanent Supportive Voucher program since July 2022, Byars was one of about 75 people who lived in McPherson Square until the National Park Service forcibly evicted them in early 2023. Since then, she has bounced around.
When Trump’s crackdown began, Byars had been living just outside George Washington Circle, a small park in Foggy Bottom that has at its center an equestrian statue of the nation’s first president. When federal agents last week instructed the homeless residents living there to clear out, Byars packed up her bags and moved — again.
“I mean what can I do about it?” Byars said recently, shrugging as she stood in line for a meal from Catholic volunteers. “Just more of the same.”
The Trump administration has threatened to fine or arrest those who refuse to move or go to a shelter. The White House said this week that of the people at the 50 encampments cleared by multiagency teams since the federal takeover began, two individuals were arrested; both were accused of assaulting police. The White House did not provide names or details on the incidents.
“President Trump is cleaning up D.C. to make it safe for all residents and visitors while ensuring homeless individuals aren’t out on the streets putting themselves at risk or posing a risk to others,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to The Post. “Homeless people will have the opportunity to be taken to a homeless shelter or receive addiction and mental health services. This will make D.C. safer and cleaner for everyone.”
Byars landed last week next to an old neighbor: Daniel Kingery, a 64-year-old man who lived for years in the McPherson Square encampment.
Kingery doesn’t have a tent. He sleeps on a cart he has constructed to display political messages and challenges to authority.
He abhors what he sees as the criminalization of homelessness and, in 2023, refused to leave McPherson Square when police officers encircled the park and closed off its entry points. He was arrested and spent several weeks in jail.
Many of the city’s chronically unhoused residents who choose to live on the street do so because they have determined that shelters don’t work for them. Advocates call the main drivers of this “the four P’s”: property, partners, pets and, most recently, pandemic. Most of the city’s shelters are not able to accommodate opposite-sex partners, pets or many personal belongings. Following the coronavirus pandemic, many unhoused people became more leery of living in the close confines of congregate shelters.
Baucom had several reasons for sleeping on the street outside New York Avenue Presbyterian instead of in a shelter: There was Lil Mama. There were the half-dozen bags she carries with her. And there was her adult son, Jonathan. He has kidney failure and needs frequent dialysis treatments.
“He can’t go into a shelter in his condition,” Baucom said.
Back near McPherson, Kingery keeps a watchful eye. Groups of police and National Guard members have approached him in recent days, he said, but have only issued verbal warnings, encouraging him to move.
He has declined.
A week and a half into the federal government’s takeover, Bowser (D) stood in the basement of a new low-barrier shelter near Union Station built to house up to 190 adults — the majority of whom, D.C. officials said, will be brought in off the street — in small dorm-style apartments. But it won’t open until after Trump’s 30-day federal emergency is set to expire.
In the immediate term, the District has made more space for people at the city’s already-crowded shelters, an approach typically reserved for cold-weather months when sleeping outside can have deadly consequences.
“Our message today, as it is every day, is that there is shelter space available in Washington, D.C., and we encourage everyone to come inside,” Bowser said at the news conference.
This week, Bowser said that 81 additional people had come into the shelter system since the push began. City staff and volunteers also planned to fan out across the city Thursday night to track the number of unhoused people on the District’s streets, Bowser and administration officials said.
A week and a half into the federal government’s takeover, Bowser (D) stood in the basement of a new low-barrier shelter near Union Station built to house up to 190 adults — the majority of whom, D.C. officials said, will be brought in off the street — in small dorm-style apartments. But it won’t open until after Trump’s 30-day federal emergency is set to expire.
In the immediate term, the District has made more space for people at the city’s already-crowded shelters, an approach typically reserved for cold-weather months when sleeping outside can have deadly consequences.
“Our message today, as it is every day, is that there is shelter space available in Washington, D.C., and we encourage everyone to come inside,” Bowser said at the news conference.
This week, Bowser said that 81 additional people had come into the shelter system since the push began. City staff and volunteers also planned to fan out across the city Thursday night to track the number of unhoused people on the District’s streets, Bowser and administration officials said.
For years, the city’s homeless population has been in decline. According to the 2025 Point-In-Time count, the annual federally mandated census of unhoused people, there were 5,138 unhoused individuals sleeping in shelters and on the streets in 2025 — a 9 percent dip from the previous year and a 19 percent drop since 2020, when 6,380 homeless people were recorded.
Rachel Pierre, the acting director of the D.C. Department of Human Services, said the city has expanded shelter capacity to meet demand and will continue to do so for the duration of the federal emergency. No one, she added, has been denied a shelter bed since Aug. 8.
“It is still not illegal to be homeless,” Bowser said. “You cannot have camps, you cannot have tents, but it is not illegal to be homeless.”
Advocates, who have pushed the District to open additional shelter capacity and redouble its outreach, have said the city is not doing enough to get unhoused individuals out of harm’s way.
At the start of the federal crackdown, community members in Ward 2, which encompasses most of downtown, began asking unhoused people what would “make them feel safer” as the federal government’s reach into the District grew. The most popular responses they got, according to Ward 2 Mutual Aid organizer Hadley Ashford, 29, were people asking for transit cards and help spending a few nights off the streets.
In less than a week, the group collected more than $5,200 and was able to move 20 people into hotel rooms for a couple of nights at a time. The majority of those the group helped, Ashford said, refused to move into a shelter because they didn’t want to have to separate from pets or partners or family members. At least one individual was immunocompromised and did not want to be in a crowded facility.
“We just wanted to get people out of harm’s way in the immediate term,” she said. “Regardless of how many donations we’re getting in, this is not something we can continue to do forever. … The city needs to do more; they’re not providing enough services.”
Homeless advocates and service providers in surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia have not seen the surge of homeless people many expected amid the federal crackdown in D.C.
ohn Mendez, executive director of Bethesda Cares, which does homeless outreach in Montgomery County, Maryland, said they’ve instead seen unhoused people relying on public transportation — to try to stay out of sight and away from where federal officers might be doing sweeps.
In recent days, Byars has been uneasy straying too far from her camp, just in case. She knows what happens when officials decide to remove an encampment: Belongings get confiscated, sometimes trashed. Tents are leveled and thrown out. Important personal effects and documents can get lost.
Still, Byars said, she hopes she won’t have to move at all.
“I’ve talked to the National Guard, and they told me they’re here to protect the people of D.C.,” Byars said. “That should mean all the people. Right?”
Days after the clearing outside New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, bags, tents and people were already back along the sidewalk. The same cycle had set back in: They came for the day center, then, when it closed, many bedded down nearby.
Kingery has been sleeping on the same street corner, just feet away from where he once lived in McPherson Square’s sprawling homeless encampment, for more than a year.
Byars, who has been removed from every major homeless encampment in the District over the past three years, has decided to try her luck on the same block. It’s familiar territory: She also used to live in the park across the street.
When asked where she might go next, if the federal government’s crackdown forces her to pack up again, Byars shrugged.
That’s a problem for another time.
Baucom and her son spent two nights in a motel. The next night, she felt pain in her shoulders, and the pair landed in the emergency room. She got some sleep there.
By the next evening, Baucom was again sitting on the steps outside the church, waiting for nightfall.
