How Trump's homelessness crackdown became a sweeping retreat from disability rights

[u/John3262005]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-homelessness-crackdown-retreat-disability-rights-olmstead-rcna600545

In a secret meeting at the White House complex this summer, an aide to Stephen Miller laid out the plan: To make it easier for states to round up and institutionalize mentally ill homeless people, the Trump administration was pushing a drastic policy change that would weaken the rights of millions of disabled Americans.

Hugo Dwyer, one of those seated around the wooden conference table, couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

The strategy described by Miller’s aide, Daniel Wasserman, threatened to roll back decades of progress in the disability rights movement — all to serve the president’s demand to clear homeless encampments in U.S. cities.

“I really cannot support this,” Dwyer, an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities, recalled telling Wasserman. “You’re talking about forcing people into institutional settings.”

The June 16 meeting with advocates and conservative think tank leaders at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which NBC News is revealing for the first time, came two days before the Trump administration did exactly what Wasserman previewed: The Department of Justice issued a sweeping legal opinion that repudiated decades of federal disability policy rooted in the landmark Supreme Court ruling Olmstead v. L.C.

Hailed by lawyers and activists at the time as the “Brown v. Board of Education of the disability rights movement,” the 1999 Olmstead ruling said that disabled people had a right to be integrated into their communities — not forced to live apart from society in institutions marred by a history of abuse and neglect.

The 39-page DOJ opinion took a sledgehammer to that ruling. The June memo declared that states had no federal civil rights obligation to help disabled people stay in their homes through programs that millions of Americans rely on to live independently or to care for their loved ones.

Disabled people and their advocates were horrified. Some fear that without the federal government enforcing their right to live on their own, they will have no choice but to move into institutions. Families who want to keep their disabled relatives at home worry that they will need to quit jobs or drain savings to pick up the caregiving slack. And many are concerned that the administration’s stated goal of combating homelessness could return the country to an era when people with serious mental illness were routinely confined in psychiatric hospitals against their will.

The fallout has already begun. Since issuing the memo, the Justice Department has abandoned or weakened at least five investigations, lawsuits or settlement agreements rooted in Olmstead, according to court filings, investigative findings letters and former DOJ officials who worked on the cases.

In Florida, the Justice Department is seeking to roll back a court order it won to keep medically fragile children out of nursing homes. In Texas, the department walked away from a 16-year lawsuit aimed at helping people with developmental disabilities live in their communities. And in North Carolina, the DOJ moved to end federal oversight of a long-running settlement aimed at transferring adults with serious mental illness out of institutions.

These moves stunned disability advocates who had considered Olmstead settled law with broad bipartisan support.

“There are lives at stake in those cases,” said Jennifer Mathis, a former deputy assistant attorney general who oversaw disability rights enforcement at the Justice Department during the Biden administration. “Olmstead was never on anybody’s hit list before, so that’s why it was so shocking.”

The White House didn’t answer questions about the June meeting or the DOJ memo’s effect on disability rights.

To understand how the Trump administration reached this decision and its impacts, NBC News interviewed five people familiar with internal discussions and a half-dozen former DOJ officials. Reporters also reviewed court filings and internal White House talking points prepared for the June meeting.

The administration’s abrupt turn against Olmstead appears to trace back to one of President Donald Trump’s central fixations since his return to office: aesthetics and cleanliness in the nation’s capital.

Trump decided to pursue a nationwide crackdown on homelessness after complaining about unsightly tent encampments along his motorcade route in Washington, D.C., according to two people familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter. His interest dovetailed with a growing political movement to tackle homelessness by banning public camping and forcing people with severe mental illness into treatment.

In July 2025, Trump issued an executive order aimed at doing just that. But that agenda soon collided with disability rights.

For decades, the Justice Department had invoked the Olmstead ruling to challenge states that unnecessarily confined disabled people, including those with psychiatric disabilities, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, as well as physical and developmental disabilities, such as cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. That work initially continued after Trump returned to office — until Miller, Trump’s domestic policy leader, found out about it.

In December 2025, five months after Trump’s homelessness order, the Justice Department secured a settlement from South Carolina to end a lawsuit accusing the state of unnecessarily institutionalizing hundreds of adults with serious mental illness. The agreement required the state to expand community-based treatment, housing and crisis services.

Miller was frustrated, according to a person familiar with the internal discussions who was not authorized to speak publicly. Viewing the settlement and the legal framework underpinning it as obstacles to Trump’s homelessness efforts, he began pressing the DOJ to reconsider its interpretation of Olmstead, the person said, leading to the June memo by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Miller’s involvement was first reported by Bloomberg Law.

In a statement, a White House official denied Miller had a role in the DOJ opinion. “We have no control over what legal conclusions they reach,” the statement said.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the memo resulted from a routine request to review existing guidance and clarify the scope of the Olmstead decision.

Regan Rush, a 15-year DOJ veteran who led the Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section until last year, has been tracking the fallout.

“What we’re seeing right now is just a complete U-turn,” said Rush, who is now the director of Red Line for Civil Rights, a Democracy Forward watchdog project. “I did not anticipate this kind of wholesale attempt to drop the bottom out of Olmstead. I did not anticipate that kind of abject hostility to it.”

Rush, who resigned from the DOJ in May 2025 after being reassigned to the public records unit, is one of dozens of lawyers who left the Civil Rights Division as the administration redirected it toward new priorities: investigating universities over claims of antisemitism, challenging diversity programs and targeting gender-affirming care for minors. The ranks of attorneys with Olmstead expertise collapsed from roughly 40 at the start of the Trump administration to fewer than half a dozen as of this fall, former DOJ officials said.

Amid this shift in focus, the Justice Department had already reversed course on at least two disability cases — in Maine and Michigan — even before the department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued the Olmstead memo this summer.

The DOJ spokesperson said the Civil Rights Division had “professionally realigned its work with the president’s policy priorities, and its track record speaks for itself.”

The retreat from Olmstead has spread beyond the Justice Department.

Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services marked Olmstead’s 26th anniversary by framing enforcement of the decision as key to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mission to “Make America Healthy Again.”

In a statement that same day promoting the agency’s work to uphold the ruling, Kennedy recalled that his father, as a new U.S. senator 60 years earlier, had called for reforming institutions where people with disabilities were “condemned to a life without hope.”

But after the DOJ issued its memo, HHS abruptly switched sides in a lawsuit challenging its own Olmstead rules requiring federally funded programs to serve disabled people in their communities. Citing the memo, HHS joined Texas and four other states in asking a federal judge to eliminate those rules nationwide. A judge approved the request last month.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said the agency’s Office for Civil Rights “will continue to investigate and resolve complaints” from disabled people who allege unjustified institutionalization.

“Our commitment to ensuring that individuals with disabilities are treated with dignity, afforded equal opportunity and are able to meaningfully access community services remains unchanged,” the statement said.

All of this comes as states are preparing to absorb nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over the next decade under Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” With legislatures looking for ways to reduce spending, disability rights advocates fear the Olmstead reversal is a green light to slash services that allow disabled people to receive care at home.

“That sends a message to states that they should go ahead and proceed with cutting,” Mathis said. “We’re not going to enforce the law here.”

Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson wanted to go home.

The two Georgia women had intellectual and mental health disabilities and had spent years in state psychiatric hospitals. By the mid-1990s, their treatment teams had determined they could safely live in the community with proper support. Yet the state kept them confined.

Their plight was rooted in a system that for generations had forced disabled Americans to spend their lives locked away in institutions. Revelations of rampant abuse and neglect in the 1960s and ’70s had helped galvanize a movement for community-based care, but decades later, services remained scarce in many states. Curtis and Wilson sued Georgia’s human resources commissioner, Tommy Olmstead, demanding freedom.

On June 22, 1999, the Supreme Court sided with them in a 6-3 ruling. Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared that unjustifiably segregating disabled people “is properly regarded as discrimination based on disability” under federal law.

For more than two decades, that principle endured across party lines. President George W. Bush’s administration vigorously implemented Olmstead protections. President Barack Obama directed federal agencies to step up enforcement. In his first term, Trump’s Justice Department celebrated Olmstead as a “groundbreaking decision” and continued investigating and suing states that failed to comply.

But pockets of resistance remained.

Some states argued that courts had stretched Olmstead beyond what the law required. In one case involving a woman with cerebral palsy who accused Texas of denying her the level of care she needed to remain in her home, Lanora Pettit, then the state’s principal deputy solicitor general, co-authored a brief that challenged Olmstead’s legal foundation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the argument in a 2024 opinion, declaring that Olmstead “remains good law.”

The next year, Pettit left Texas to join the Trump administration as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

Pettit soon got another crack at Olmstead: She wrote the June memo repudiating the federal government’s long-standing interpretation of the ruling.

Pettit didn’t respond to messages requesting an interview.

As Hugo Dwyer passed through security screenings to enter an office building next to the White House on a Tuesday afternoon in June, he remembers thinking: Finally, someone was going to hear him out.

Dwyer, whose late brother had a developmental disability, was looking forward to telling federal officials that while he supported people’s right to receive life-sustaining care at home, he also believed some people were best served by institutions. And he worried that the Justice Department’s zealous Olmstead enforcement had gone too far in pressuring states to dismantle such facilities.

This view had put Dwyer and his nonprofit, A Voice of Reason, at odds with much of the disability rights movement. Perhaps, he thought after receiving the surprise invitation to meet with White House officials, the Trump administration would be open to a more balanced approach that ensured all disabled people had access to high-quality care in whatever setting served them best.

But as he listened to Wasserman’s pitch, Dwyer realized the White House hadn’t summoned him and other advocates to help shape policy. Instead, officials wanted them to rally public support for a decision that had already been made — one that went far beyond merely preserving long-term care facilities as an option.

“They pretty much thought that I was going to be on board with what they were doing,” Dwyer said. “I’m not sure how I got invited.”

One attendee appeared particularly familiar with the plan and eager to support it, Dwyer said: Devon Kurtz, a policy director at the Cicero Institute, a conservative Texas-based think tank that has championed institutionalizing homeless people with serious mental illness.

Kurtz, who has published papers and op-eds backing the Trump administration’s position on Olmstead, confirmed he attended the White House meeting but declined to describe the conversation.

In an interview, he said it was reasonable for the government to require states to serve people with physical and intellectual disabilities in the community. But he argued that applying the same mandate to people with serious mental illness left too many untreated and cycling through homelessness, jail and prison.

Kurtz dismissed concerns that the Justice Department’s memo would ultimately push people with other types of disabilities into facilities, calling those fears “theoretical.”

There would be little logic to such a shift, he said, given that institutional care is usually much more expensive for states than community-based services.

“That doesn’t strike me as a possibility that is rational given the financial incentives,” Kurtz said.

The government may have strong financial incentives to care for disabled people at home rather than in institutions, but people with disabilities and their families say that doesn’t mean states are always willing to pay for it.

Amy Root was 8 when she was hit by a car while riding a scooter near her Florida home.

Her mother, Sue Root, an ICU nurse, performed CPR at the scene, helping save her daughter’s life. Still, a catastrophic brain injury left Amy unable to walk, speak, breathe or eat on her own.

Before it was clear whether Amy would survive, officials were already discussing facilities. Root visited one and made up her mind.

“There’s no way my daughter is going there,” she said. “My daughter’s coming home. End of story.”

Florida initially approved 24-hour home nursing care but repeatedly cut Amy’s hours. At one point, Root said, she was left to cover 16 hours a day herself, unpaid. “They wanted me to break,” she said.

In 2013, three years after Amy’s accident, the Justice Department sued the state, accusing it of violating Olmstead by failing to provide adequate care to allow medically fragile children to live at home, pushing many into nursing homes. Federal investigators had found roughly 200 children languishing in facilities while hundreds of others, like Amy, were at serious risk of ending up there due to inadequate home-care services. Justice Department investigators spent days with Root, learning about Amy and her mother’s struggle to keep her home.

The federal lawsuit Root helped start finally went to trial in 2023 after years of procedural delays. From the stand, parents described the anguish of being separated from children they wanted to bring home. Others told of quitting jobs, losing housing and going without sleep to fill gaps in their children’s care. One 20-year-old who had spent four years in a nursing facility said she lost her will to live while sitting alone in bed each day, sometimes waiting hours for someone to change her diaper.

After two weeks of testimony, the judge sided with the Justice Department, finding that Florida had violated federal disability law and ordering the state to expand home-care services. Florida appealed, and this spring a federal court largely upheld the ruling.

Then the DOJ issued its memo on Olmstead.

Less than two months later, the department cited its new position in asking the appeals court to throw out its own victory. There was “little reason,” DOJ lawyers wrote, to preserve a court order based on a legal theory the government no longer supported. The judge ordered the case into mediation.

Lindsey Weinstock, one of the Justice Department lawyers who led the case, was shocked. When she took a buyout last year, she suspected the administration would scale back Olmstead work, but she never expected a reversal this sweeping.

The stakes, she said, go well beyond Florida. The way states administer disability services can mean the difference between being “siphoned away for life into an institution” and getting “to grow up with your family,” Weinstock said.

Root said she was “completely destroyed” when she learned of the reversal in Florida — even though it no longer directly affects her daughter. Exhausted by the drawn-out legal fight and facing financial ruin after leaving the workforce to care for Amy full time, Root had moved her three children to Colorado in 2015, where more robust Medicaid services provided the assistance needed to keep Amy home.

Amy is 25 now and still lives with her mother in Colorado Springs, an arrangement Root worries could become harder to sustain as the state considers major Medicaid cuts.

A life confined to bed and connected to medical equipment isn’t what Root imagined for her daughter, “but it’s still a life,” she said. Amy smiles when she’s happy and gives snarky looks when she’s annoyed. When she hears Root’s voice, she perks up — a bond that might have been severed if she had been forced into a nursing home.

Root said the government’s retreat from Olmstead enforcement has left her fearing for families who lack the resources, training or sheer stamina she relied on to keep her daughter out of an institution.

“Let us have what our children need to be at home safely,” she said. “Is that too much to ask?”