Friends and neighbors,
We have seen ICE and the National Guard perform homeless sweeps in other cities where they've been deployed, and we’ve heard Trump calling for increased sweeps and even disappearance of unhoused people.
It is a bad, cruel, and failed policy when the Trump administration does it, and it is a bad, cruel, and failed policy when the city of Portland does it.
As we face the very real possibility of federal troops being deployed to our streets to target one group of vulnerable people, we absolutely cannot start using our own police to do their work for them by targeting another.
Some will argue that sweeps are about safety and compassion, but the evidence is clear and overwhelming. Sweeps kill people.
For far too long, Portland has pursued a failed policy of criminalizing poverty. As a result, we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars only to see the problem grow, and deaths among our homeless neighbors quadruple between 2019 and 2023.
It’s time to change direction. We need to protect ALL Portlanders.
We need to focus on programs that move people closer to housing and stability, not policies that punish and further destabilize. Programs like low-barrier jobs programs, direct rental assistance, food aid, and day shelters that provide hygiene, clothing, and case management.
Programs like these are humane, cost-effective, and they work. They address the issue of visible poverty that neighbors and businesses are concerned about, but they do so by offering dignity, not displacement. They break the cycle of disappointment and depression—where people spend all day waiting in lines, worrying about their belongings, with no meaningful work. They are a hand up, not a sweep away.
But at the end of the day, the only real, lasting solution to homelessness is to provide deeply affordable housing for all. Unless we stop the flow of folks onto the streets, we’re never going to make real progress. That is why we need to move aggressively towards a Social Housing model— high quality, permanently affordable housing that will serve the vast majority of Portlanders, from the unhoused to the middle class.
The choice before us is clear. We can either align ourselves with the politics of division, of sweeps, of cages, and of death, or we can choose the politics of solidarity, of housing, of healthcare, and of life.
In Solidarity,
Mitch Green
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