OpEd: The true danger behind Trump's Executive Order targeting homelessness has been ignored by the media

 On April 1st, 2003, I was released from an Alabama State Prison for an offense that requires me to register for inclusion on a publicly accessible registry. Within a year I was homeless on the streets of Cincinnati, Ohio. 

It was a struggle to find a way off of the streets. I stayed in a temporary shelter and had even gotten approved to stay six weeks in a seedy hotel while I spent each weekday morning searching for a job. When the funding ran out, I spent a night sleeping on a service road just off I-75, but a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church who had been ministering to the homeless allowed me to stay at his place until I got back on my feet. 

Despite graduating with honors and having a Bachelor’s degree, I only managed to find a job stocking shelves at a grocery store for barely above minimum wage. I found a sleeping room on the “wrong side of Victory Parkway” but it was better than sleeping on a service road. But that sleeping room was within 1000 feet of a program called the “Life Skills Center”, what was then a GED program for people ages 16 to 22 to get a GED, so I was forced to move again.

Once I found a new apartment, the city of Cincinnati was considering passing a local residency restriction ordinance that would force me out of my new apartment, so I challenged them and they altered the ordinance so I would not be forced to move. Today, I live in the home of a former activist and I collect SSI and SNAP.

I have never forgotten about my experiences living on the streets in the early years of my release. In that time, I’ve become an outspoken critic of the US sex offense registry. That is why Executive Order entitled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” bothers me. There are two provisions in the Executive Order that targets persons forced to register on the public sex offense registry. 

First, the order demands law enforcement increase monitoring and mapping of transient registrants. I was required to register weekly when I was homeless and if I was to stay in a different location, I had 72 hours to report it. That was precious time taken away for seeking housing and employment since that required an in-person visit to the registration office, where I would sit upwards of an hour just to say I’m still homeless.

Second, it requires police to take those arrested for a federal offense and screen them for possible civil commitment. In 2019, I was falsely accused of theft in Florida. The charges against me were dropped due to actual innocence, but in the meantime I was detained for 24 days including six days on the road for extradition to Florida. Arrest is not the same as conviction, yet I was still forced to post bond then go about proving I was innocent. I believed that Florida would also try to have me civilly committed due to my past criticism of their draconian residency restriction laws.

As an anti-registry activist, I am familiar with the use of “civil commitment” as an extension of prison. For over 15 years, I’ve been in contact with multiple persons confined in the Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP). The MSOP is like the Hotel California—you can check out any time but you can never leave. In fact, for the first 20 years, no one left the MSOP shadow prison except through death. In fact, at least 95 people have died inside the MSOP, while less than two dozen have been released, and it took years of lawsuits to allow even a single release. It costs Minnesota taxpayers around $100 million annually to house only around 770 people beyond their prison sentences.

The US Supreme Court upheld the terrible practice of civil commitment in the 1997 Kansas v. Hendricks decision. The decision that claimed that civil commitment is regulatory or civil and not punitive or punishment was later used to uphold the practice of forcing persons convicted of sex offenses to register in the 2003 Smith v. Doe decision. In turn, these rulings have been used to justify restrictions on where persons forced to register can live, work, and even visit.

Currently, at least 31 states apply residency restrictions to at least some Registered Persons, while at least nine states allow municipalities to make their own rules and regulations on where a Registrant can live, work, or visit. In Florida and Texas, nearly half of all communities have municipal ordinances that include residency and proximity laws, Halloween bans, or even “anti-clustering” laws prohibiting more than one registrant in a particular area. In Wisconsin, some communities adopted an “Original Domicile” rule that bans a Registered Person from residing in the community unless that Registrant previously resided in the community.

The end result is a harrowing experience for a Registered Person seeking to reintegrate after serving a sentence. When seeking housing for myself, I find few people willing to rent to me regardless of any existing law. Some are very proud of telling me no. But even when I find someone willing to rent to me, I have to take the added step of taking the address to the local registration office to see if the address meets the residency restriction requirements. The only other way to speculate is through access to plat maps, which often require a visit to the county clerk’s office.

This is why Registered Person experience homelessness far more often than the average American.

According to Housing and Urban Development, 18 out of 10000 (or 0.18%) Americans experienced homelessness at some point in time in the year 2022. By contrast, about 3.5% of Registered Persons were currently unhoused and nearly twice as many reported being friendly homeless at some point in the past year. In some parts of the US where local restrictions are particularly onerous, like Broward and Miami-Dade Counties in Florida, about one out of three Registered Persons are unhoused. And the Cicero Institute found that one out of ten unhoused persons was on the public registry.

Bad public policy has always stemmed from past knee-jerk reactions to high-profile cases. Minnesota’s expansion of the MSOP was a response to the Dru Sjodin case in 2003; the National Sex Offender Public Website was also named after her. Municipal sex offense restriction ordinances were passed following the Jessica Lunsford case in 2005.

This Executive Order is partly a response to a current high-profile case, except the intent here is to distract from Donald Trump’s alleged connection to Jeffrey Epstein. What better way to deflect allegations of sexual abuse than by compelling law enforcement to round up persons made unhoused by a myriad of laws and ship them off to shadow prisons? Maybe then we’ll forget the whole Epstein thing, right? 

Civil commitment is not a solution to a housing crisis created by bad laws and policies. Minnesota could do a lot better spending that $100 million on housing the 9200 unhoused persons in that state. This country can do better than waste billions on harassing the unhoused.