Given D.C.’s well documented low rate of violent crime, we should pay attention to this language focused on “vagrancy” because it offers evidence for what this crackdown is really about. Most politicians and activists use terms like “homeless,” “unhoused,” or “people experiencing homelessness” to describe the population the quotes above are referencing. But this administration's actions demonstrate that its officials view people who fit these descriptions through a lens of crime, drug abuse, and mental health crises, with little attention to the economic and material factors shaping their situations. As a result, Vance, Trump, and others are turning back the clock on their language when discussing these issues, choosing to reference outdated criminal categories that haven’t been enshrined in law for more than 50 years.
But it goes beyond language, of course. By actively targeting visible signs of poverty through encampment clearance and arrests of unhoused people, the Trump Administration is trying to remove evidence of our economy’s failure to provide sufficient wages and adequate social services that would prevent people from living on the streets. The expansive definitions of vagrancy, and the discretionary power that vagrancy laws conferred upon law enforcement officers as a result, date back to the colonial era.
When British colonists settled the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries, they brought vagrancy laws and other legal concepts limiting the full enfranchisement and legal rights of poor people with them. Colonists and early Americans amended and adapted these laws with shifting social, economic, and political circumstances from the 18th century through the 20th.
Colonial and early American local statutes and state laws criminalized many of the activities that low-income workers and people experiencing poverty engaged in for survival: frequent relocations, sleeping outdoors, and asking for assistance in public spaces. Municipal officials used vagrancy laws to define looking like a person who lacked “visible means of subsistence” as a crime.
These were “status offenses,” which could penalize people based on who they were and where they came from, not their actions. For example, New Jersey’s law from the 1770s was incredibly broad, “deem[ing]” as “vagrants […] all poor indigent persons strolling from their places of legal settlement.” Under New York’s 1820s statute, the state defined vagrants as “all idle persons, who, not having visible means to maintain themselves, live without employment,” as well as “all persons wandering abroad and lodging in taverns, groceries, beer-houses, out-houses, market-places, sheds, or barns, or in the open air, and not giving a good account of themselves.” Both states punished people who returned after being removed for violating vagrancy laws by public whipping.