No Federal Funds for
Homeless Detention Camps
What starts with homeless people and immigrants is a threat to all of us.
Everybody needs a safe place to live. Instead of focusing on proven solutions to homelessness, like housing and support, Utah is proposing taking money away from programs that solve homelessness to build a massive, remote, government-run detention camp.
We’ve seen this before. Detention camps are not a solution for anyone–not homeless people, not immigrants, not anyone. Utah has indicated that it will ask the federal Government to help fund this project.
We can still stop this. We need your help to demand “No Federal Funding for Homeless Detention Camps.”
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How did we get here?
In 2025, Trump issued an executive order directing states to move away from evidence-based homelessness policies and toward throwing people in jail for sleeping outside. Trump has also been campaigning for years to “round up” homeless people and punish them, instead of housing them. However, laws that make it a crime to be homeless are not new.
For years, billionaires with connections to Trump, Palantir, and Elon Musk have been lobbying states all across the country, including Utah, to adopt anti-homeless laws. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass that any city or state in the country can arrest and ticket someone for sleeping outside, even when there are no safe alternatives available.
Then in late 2025, Utah’s Governor Cox announced the state would seek federal funding to realize Trump’s vision of a massive government-run and taxpayer-funded homeless detention camp.
History has shown time and time again that throwing people into detention camps is never okay. We can’t let them build it.
What are anti-homeless laws?
Everyone needs a safe place to live. Instead of fulfilling people’s basic needs, politicians are making homelessness worse by throwing people in jail for sleeping outside.
To criminalize homelessness means to threaten and/or use police, arrests, fines, tickets, and now, detention camps to punish people for sleeping, laying down, asking for help, or just existing in public places. Homeless encampment evictions, where homeless people are forced out of public spaces through harassment and threats, are a cruel benchmark of criminalization.
Criminalizing homelessness and poverty is not new. Homelessness is and has always been a policy choice, one that disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as disabled people and LGBTQ+ people.
What is Johnson v. Grants Pass?
On April 22nd 2024, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass. On June 28th, a decision was announced that cities and states can arrest people for sleeping outside, even when there are no safe alternatives.
The Supreme Court has given cities and states across the U.S. permission to punish people who are forced to sleep outside, even when they have no other safe option. A ruling like this does nothing to end homelessness, and punishes people for existing in public simply because they have nowhere else to go.
Studies and experience show that criminalizing homelessness only leads to more homelessness. Prohibiting acts of human survival, such as sleeping outside, is a waste of taxpayer money and actually makes it harder to connect people with housing. This ruling is a clear sign that the Supreme Court, as well as many elected officials across the political spectrum, would rather side with billionaires and make homelessness worse than simply ensure everyone is safely housed.
What are the real causes of homelessness?
The number one cause of homelessness is the dire lack of affordable housing. Decades of failed, racist housing policies have turned the basic need of housing into a commodity only the wealthy few can afford. Instead of focusing on fulfilling people’s needs, politicians are criminalizing homelessness by giving handcuffs to poor people and handouts to billionaires.
- For every $100 increase in rent, homelessness goes up by 9%.
- 60% of Americans can’t afford the basic costs of living.
- More than half of Americans pay more than they can afford in rent and one in four people worry about becoming homeless.
- 75% of voters say that lack of affordable housing is the primary cause of homelessness.
- 77% of voters say that we need to address homelessness through housing and services rather than arrests.