The Government Can Now Lock You Up for Being Poor, Sick, or Addicted
They’re not fixing homelessness. They’re disappearing the people who remind them it exists.
As the month stumbles toward its end, so does the illusion of rights in a nation that swore it was free. On July 24th, Donald Trump put a permanent marker to paper and signed an executive order that gave the federal government permission to vanish the people we already try not to see. The people on the sidewalk. The people muttering to themselves in the library bathroom. The ones holding cardboard signs outside a Starbucks. The people this country failed long before it decided to criminalize their suffering.
Like his previous executive orders, this one also came versed to convince you that he’s doing this for you. It called the unhoused a threat, not because of what they’ve done, but because of who they are. People without shelter. People with addictions. People with mental health diagnoses. People who scare the rich just by existing.
This isn’t about services. It’s not about care. It’s about removal. It’s about creating a country where people don’t have to look at poverty, so they can pretend it doesn’t exist. And if they do see it, they’ll only see it from the outside of a cop car window or a closed psychiatric ward.
This is not reform. This is authoritarianism 101. This executive order is a shiny, bureaucratic way of saying “we’re about to lock people up en masse under the illusion of help.”
Let’s Talk About What This Order Really Says:
They’ll tell you it’s to help people, but once you read the order you realize it’s not that. It’s not that at all. It reads like a plan for care, but acts like a roadmap for disappearance. Behind the promises of treatment and safety is a policy built to detain, punish, and erase.
Buried in the order is a term with a long and bitter history: civil commitment.
It sounds neutral, almost clinical but what it really means is that the government can lock someone away in an institution without a crime, without a trial, without their consent. If a person is homeless. If they have a mental health condition. If someone decides they can’t care for themselves. That’s all it takes. No jury. No defense. Just a signature and a cell.
The language used is vague enough to stretch around almost anyone.
“A risk to themselves or others.”
“Unable to care for themselves.”
Those phrases have been used before. They’ve been used to justify locking up dissidents, disappear people that are inconvenient, and to make the suffering vanish without dealing with what caused it. They’re language is flexible by design, soft enough to sound compassionate, ambiguous enough to be weaponized.
The order doesn’t stop there. It doesn’t offer housing. It doesn’t offer services. What it does offer is more arrests. More crackdowns on loitering, squatting, sitting still for too long in a public place. In the name of “safety”, it makes existing without money a punishable act.
It criminalizes the poor, not the poverty.
And while it does all this, it reaches for something even more dangerous. It allows the government access to people’s private health information. The programs that still offer help will now be expected to collect data. It explicitly names mental health records, addiction histories, medical diagnoses. And once collected, that information can be shared with police, federal agents, prosecutors, whoever needs a file to justify taking someone off the street.
But it doesn’t stop at a clipboard or a local case file. That data won’t just sit in a drawer somewhere. Under previous executive orders this year, agencies were told to share what they gather. Not just across departments, but across entire systems. What starts in a housing program could end up in a federal crime database. What you say to a social worker could quietly travel through software built for war.
Because behind the scenes, there’s something else at play. Palantir, the tech company that built Gotham and Foundry, has spent years designing platforms to link and analyze enormous amounts of information from completely different sources. I mean we’re talking about police records, medical records, surveillance footage, social media posts, case notes, purchase histories. and even travel logs. All of it, mapped and stitched together by machine learning.
It was built for battlefield intelligence. Now it is pointed inward.
With Trump’s directive to unify and share data between agencies, what’s being created is a nationwide nervous system. A real-time feed of the country’s most vulnerable people constantly updated and monitored. Not just a database. A weaponized brain.
Imagine if the Soviet Union had a supercomputer that could flag you for being mentally ill, for being unhoused, for visiting the wrong clinic too many times. Imagine if it could suggest you be committed, or detained, or quietly removed. Imagine if George Orwell’s telescreens didn’t just watch you but predicted what you’d do next.
That is not science fiction anymore. That is public policy in America, 2025.
Who Would Run These Facilities?
The executive order is written as intentionally ambiguous regarding how these facilities would operate. It lists that these detainees would be sent to “appropriate facilities” and gives examples such as “treatment centers” and “housing and support networks” without distinctly specifying the who, what, when, or where. That’s not on accident.
It does, however, specify that these individuals would be sent to, "private housing and support networks.”
Private housing and support networks. Contractors. Not government employees. Not subject to public information laws. Not subject to FOIA requests. This leaves these facilities able to operate in the shadows all while running off with your tax dollars.
Could it possibly be Geo Group and CoreCivic? The same beasts behind 99% of the immigration “processing centers” in the US? This is their domain.
See, not only do these companies make money from private prisons, and immigration processing centers. They also own and operate places that fit into this executive order just a little too perfectly. And they’ve been expanding their private detention network over the last several months. In 2025, they’ve brought in some of their largest federal contracts to date under the Trump Administration.
Geo Group owns “Residental Re-entry Centers” and “mental health treatment centers” under the Bi Incorporated subsidiary. Core Civic already owns and operates “re-entry programs” and “secure physiatry units” and openly advertises its ability to partner with governments for “rehabilitation” and behavioral health management.
Now, I’d like to remind you that this is the very same Trump Administration Geo Group & Core Civic actively lobbied for and funded in 2024.
Geo Group alone spent between 2 and 3 million dollars supporting Donald Trump and the GOP.
Who could’ve guessed private prisons would benefit the most from an authoritarian government? Who could’ve possibly seen this coming?
So, remember, this isn’t about compassion. It isn’t about making cities safer. It’s about control. It’s about cleaning up the sidewalks without ever looking anyone in the eye. It’s about making the margins disappear so the rest of the country doesn’t have to feel uncomfortable. This isn’t policy. It’s a quiet purge. A legal blueprint to turn human suffering into a public nuisance and sweep it away.
How The Soviet Union Did the Same Thing
This isn’t the first time a government has blurred the line between illness and disobedience. The Soviet Union didn’t need truth to silence people. It had psychiatrists.
In the 1960s and 70s, Soviet authorities began diagnosing dissidents with something they called “sluggish schizophrenia.” It was a vague, shape-shifting condition, supposedly marked by things like paranoia, stubbornness, reformist ideas, and “overvalued beliefs.” In other words, disagreeing with the state was treated as a symptom of mental illness.
They didn’t need evidence. They didn’t need a trial. All they needed was a white coat and a pen.
This echoes the bill introduced earlier this year by a state senator Justin Eichorn — who was convicted a week later for trying to solicit a child — that tried to classify disliking Trump as a mental illness. The executive order is just a quieter version, hiding behind softer language.
Once labeled, people could be locked away for months or years in psychiatric hospitals run by the KGB. Some were given forced medication. Others were beaten. Many were cut off from families, lawyers, the outside world. The institutions had a name in the dissident community — psikhushkas.
People feared them more than prison because prison at least admitted it was punishment. This was worse. This was gaslighting in its most literal form. You’re not being silenced. You’re just sick. You’re not being punished. You’re being helped.
We’re not punishing you. We’re helping you.
The diagnosis was flexible enough to catch anyone the state found inconvenient. Journalists. Writers. Protestors. People who spoke too loudly about truth. People who refused to pretend.
Nazi Germany Did It Too: Aktion T4
Long before the world understood the full scale of Nazi brutality, the regime tested its power on those least able to resist. Not in the camps. Not with soldiers. But quietly, through hospitals and clinics. It started with a program called Aktion T4.
In 1939, the Nazi government announced that it would begin transferring people with severe disabilities to receive what they called specialized medical care. The public was told this was about mercy. They said the nation could no longer afford to care for people with incurable illnesses. The language was clean, technical, and reassuring. But what it masked was a systematic program to murder tens of thousands of people deemed “unworthy of life.”
The first to die were children with developmental delays. Then came adults with schizophrenia, epilepsy, or physical impairments. Elderly people with dementia. Patients with mental illness. Anyone who couldn’t work or was seen as a burden on the state. The government labeled them “useless eaters” and sent them to die in gas chambers disguised as showers, or through forced starvation, overdoses, and neglect.
Doctors became gatekeepers for the regime. Psychiatrists signed off on extermination orders. Families were often told that their loved ones had died of pneumonia, and were mailed urns filled with ashes that likely belonged to someone else entirely. There were no trials or right to defend yourself. There were just quiet disappearances with bureaucratic paperwork and forged death certificates.
Aktion T4 was not a rogue experiment. It was a government program with offices, payrolls, and logistics teams. It involved over a hundred institutions across Germany and Austria. It was the first time the Nazis used gas chambers. It was also the test case for public reaction. When the backlash was limited, the regime knew it could go further.
After 1941, the program officially ended, but the killing did not stop. The infrastructure and personnel that made Aktion T4 possible were later redirected to the extermination camps. The logic that justified those early murders — that some lives were too costly, too damaged, too inconvenient — would go on to shape the Holocaust itself.
Today, when governments talk about shifting people with mental illness or addiction into institutions for their own good, we have to ask what that really means. When vague standards like “a danger to themselves or others” become the threshold for detention, we need to understand where that path can lead. When treatment becomes compulsory and privacy becomes optional, we are not building systems of care. We are building systems of control. And in a country already building camps like Alligator Auschwitz, this isn’t a red flag. It’s a three-alarm fire.
Final Thoughts
Aktion T4 did not begin with mass murder; it began with paperwork, vague diagnoses, and public indifference. What many forget is that the Nazis modeled much of their ideology on American eugenics policy, borrowing language and laws from U.S. sterilization programs that targeted the poor, disabled, and mentally ill. The Supreme Court once called these sterilizations constitutional, declaring that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” That same cold logic survives today in the architecture of our immigration system, where migrants are detained without charges, where ICE raids tear families apart, and where asylum seekers are sent to prisons for daring to flee violence. The same immigration system that forcibly sterilized immigrants during Trump’s first administration.
It lives in Trump’s latest executive order, which allows people to be institutionalized without trial, criminalizes poverty, and turns health records into tools of surveillance. This is not some new idea. It is an old and familiar playbook, dressed in modern language and powered by modern technology.
If the Nazis had Palantir, they would have used it.
If the Soviets had predictive algorithms, they would have fed them dissenters.
What we’re building now is a system that doesn’t need to ask why someone is poor or sick … it only needs to decide they should not be seen and once that decision is made, there are no limits to what the state can justify.
Note From the Author: If you made it this far, you already know this isn’t about headlines. It’s about paying attention before the window to do so disappears. I write to document what’s happening in real time. I investigate where I can, but I also write like this (fast, emotional, unfiltered) because some things shouldn’t wait for an editor.
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Love, Dissent
♥
One of the first things Hitler did was make unemployment illegal… everything going on in the US smells like the foetid inhuman stench of fascism.
Oh, this hurts. Dredging up a long suppressed memory from my childhood, when my father, working two jobs and building a house in his off hours, had a breakdown. My mother, on advice of relatives, had him committed to the local mental hospital, where he underwent electroshock therapy. They all thought they were helping him.
I've seen film of that kind of treatment. Reprehensible, cruel, inhumane. I cannot and will not forgive the system or the people that allowed that to happen. It appears we are resurrecting that type of system; we are losing our humanity, and quickly. And I fear that peaceful protest will not be enough to stop this decline.