The Biden-era terminations of rhetoric over visible poverty have given way to a renewed federal emphasis on so-called “vagrancy,” with senior Trump administration officials using the word to justify the deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and a series of sweeping executive orders to clear encampments.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in recent weeks that Union Station had become “more as a center for vagrancy than a hub for commerce and travel,” and Vice President J.D. Vance said the historic rail and transit hub — like “much of the rest of the nation’s capital” — was full of “vagrants” and “chronically homeless” people who should be removed. The comments have accompanied a March 2025 executive order requiring the “prompt removal and cleanup of all homeless or vagrant encampments” in the District and a July order of national scope that described “endemic vagrancy” and promised to “fight vagrancy on America’s Streets.”
Administration officials have framed the actions as measures to restore safety and commerce to public spaces. Critics and historians say the language and tactics echo a long history of laws and practices that criminalized poverty and enabled broad discretionary policing powers. Legal scholars and advocates point to a March 2025 uptick in removals of encampments in D.C. and other cities, occurring before and after the introduction of federal resources and troops.
The term “vagrancy” has a legal and social history in the United States that dates to the colonial era, when British settlers brought statutes that criminalized frequent relocation, sleeping outdoors and publicly asking for assistance. Those laws typically defined vagrancy in broad terms — in some statutes, merely lacking “visible means of subsistence” could be treated as criminal — and often allowed municipal officials to arrest or remove people without formal judicial proceedings.
New Jersey’s 1770s law, for example, labeled “all poor indigent persons strolling from their places of legal settlement” as vagrants, while a 19th-century New York statute described vagrants as “idle persons” without visible means who lodged in taverns, market-places or the open air and who could not “give a good account of themselves.” Enforcement in many cities was systematic and seasonal: officials carried out daily arrests and large sweeps, particularly in autumn, when workers who had been employed during warmer months might face unemployment and lack of shelter in winter.
City officials sometimes presented these roundups as cost-saving measures. In 1817, New York’s Common Council ordered marshals to bring before a committee “all such vagrants and street beggars as could be found” and commit them to the Bridewell or the penitentiary; the council reported arresting nearly 200 people in a single week who lacked legal settlement or visible means of livelihood. Critics at the time questioned the efficacy and humanity of such measures. The Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison asked the Pennsylvania legislature in 1851, “why put a man in a cell because he has no home?” and argued that vagrancy laws punished misfortune rather than wrongdoing.
Vagrancy statutes also intersected with systems of racial and social control. During the antebellum period, such laws were used to track and return enslaved people who fled bondage. After the Civil War, some state and local authorities used vagrancy provisions to coerce labor from newly emancipated Black Americans, threatening arrest and forced labor for those who refused employment. In subsequent decades the statutes were deployed to police immigrants, political activists and LGBTQ people, among others deemed “undesirable.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled broad vagrancy statutes unconstitutional in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville in 1972, concluding that vague laws gave police excessive discretion to arrest people based on who they were rather than what they had done. The decision led many municipalities to adopt narrower ordinances criminalizing specific activities, such as public camping or sleeping in vehicles, instead of status-based offenses.
In recent decades, some cities shifted policy toward decriminalization and Housing First approaches that prioritize shelter and services. Those advances have been eroded in part by a 2024 Supreme Court decision, Grants Pass v. Johnson, which permitted more expansive municipal action against homelessness in public spaces and referenced longstanding municipal police powers in its reasoning. Legal experts say the Grants Pass ruling opened the way for renewed encampment clearances and for new enforcement practices that mirror older approaches.
Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan, an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic, has argued in a TIME essay that contemporary federal rhetoric and actions draw openly on the vocabulary of earlier vagrancy statutes. She wrote that the administration’s focus on “vagrancy” signals a view of people experiencing homelessness primarily through the lens of crime, drug abuse and mental health crisis, with little attention to economic factors such as wages, housing supply and social services.
Local and federal officials implementing encampment clearances have described the measures as necessary to maintain public order and public health. Advocates for people experiencing homelessness and some municipal officials counter that such actions displace vulnerable individuals, increase the hardships associated with housing instability and compound mental health and substance use challenges. Those stakeholders say enforcement-based responses are unlikely to address the underlying economic and service shortfalls that contribute to homelessness.
Since the March executive order, the District has seen multiple clearances and arrests tied to encampment removals, according to local reports and municipal communications. The effort has included coordination among federal, state and municipal law enforcement and, in some cases, the deployment of National Guard personnel to support security and logistical tasks. The District’s crime statistics show relatively low rates of violent crime in many neighborhoods, a fact observers point to when weighing the stated safety rationale for large-scale removals.
Legal challenges and local pushback have begun to appear in several jurisdictions where the federal orders have been referenced or where Grants Pass has been cited by municipal governments. Courts and advocacy groups will likely play a role in testing how far municipal and federal authorities may go in enforcing encampment removals and related ordinances.
The debate over language and enforcement arrives as the nation confronts long-term shortages in affordable housing, gaps in mental health and addiction treatment, and varied municipal approaches to homelessness. Historians and civil liberties advocates say the renewed use of the term “vagrancy” risks reviving a legal and enforcement framework long criticized for enabling arbitrary policing and for disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. The Trump administration and its spokespeople have defended the measures as restoring order to public spaces and protecting public safety.
Reporting for this article drew on a TIME analysis by historians and legal scholars, archival examples of early American vagrancy statutes and recent court decisions that have shaped the legal landscape for municipal responses to homelessness.