Foggy Bottom community members worry that President Donald Trump’s mounting demands for D.C. to abruptly clear homeless encampments will heighten displacements and stifle resources for the District’s unhoused community.
Two days after Trump pressured D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to clear “unsightly” encampments by the State Department and White House in a Truth Social post earlier this month, District officials on March 7 abandoned typical protocol to evict five unhoused individuals living next to the E Street Expressway with a one-day notice. Local homeless advocates and neighborhood officials are concerned the District will forgo encampment eviction protocol under the Trump administration as part of a broader submission to intensified federal authority.
D.C.’s standard encampment closure protocol requires officials to post signs alerting residents of a clearing two weeks in advance.
“Any decision to clear an encampment must be made, after careful consideration and only after ensuring the welfare of the unhoused, by the duly elected government of the District, in accordance with the District’s laws and policies,” Jim Malec, a member of the Foggy Bottom and West End Advisory Neighborhood Commission, said in a message. “The president has no role in this process, and the mayor should have ignored his social media tantrum.”
The morning after Trump’s post, Bowser said in a news conference that District officials had already planned to clear the encampment at the E Street Expressway — which is about a block from campus — before his post. Bowser said she’d discussed the encampments with Trump’s staff but denied that the administration ordered her office to “do anything,” characterizing Trump’s call as a “notice.”
Bowser has cooperated with Trump’s administration on some of his demands for D.C. so far in his second term, marked by her announcing that crews would paint over the large yellow “Black Lives Matter” lettering on 16th Street, one block from the White House, after congressional Republicans threatened to cut D.C.’s federal funding if the city didn’t remove the words.
Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage said in a statement that the District previously planned to close the E Street Expressway encampment that Trump posted about but postponed the cleanup due to weather.
Web archives show that on Feb. 27, eight days before Trump’s post, officials had not posted their intention to clear the E Street Expressway encampment on D.C.’s encampments web page, which listed evictions scheduled as far in the future as March 12. A version of the web page from March 7 shows the newly scheduled eviction, scheduled for the same day.
Only one sticker sign had been posted at the E Street Expressway encampment notifying residents of an imminent cleanup by March 6, according to Street Sense Media, a street paper covering D.C. homelessness.
Street Sense also reported that a DMHHS spokesperson has referred to the eviction as an immediate disposition, contradicting signs posted at the scene indicating a “scheduled full cleanup.”
While the District’s encampment engagement protocol — a set of rules for city workers to follow as they carry out evictions of unhoused people — requires the District to post signs two weeks before a “standard disposition,” DMHHS, the agency responsible for encampment evictions, can also issue an “immediate disposition” for emergencies and risks to security, safety and health.
Immediate dispositions are the only type of eviction that can be conducted without notifying the residents and the chair of the Interagency Council on Homelessness at least 48 hours before the eviction, according to the protocol. Immediate dispositions require the deputy mayor to articulate the reason.
DMHHS did not return a request for comment on why the city cleared the E Street Expressway encampment as an immediate disposition.
District officials also cleared an encampment at 27th and K streets on March 14, a scheduled clearing, and planned nearly a dozen more for the coming weeks.
City officials offered residents evicted from the E Street Expressway rooms at The Aston — a homeless shelter on New Hampshire Avenue that currently hosts 82 people — according to Sakina Thompson, who co-chairs the Community Advisory Team overseeing the facility.
Trump said in his March 5 Truth Social post that if Bowser “wasn’t capable” of cleaning up the encampments, then federal officials “will be forced to do it for her,” an apparent reference to his campaign promise to “clean up” the District. He also signed an executive order on March 15 to dismantle the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which aims to prevent and end homelessness in the United States.
During the E Street Expressway eviction, District employees also scrubbed graffiti off the retaining walls hugging the highway exit. Yannik Omictin, a former ANC commissioner, told Street Sense on March 7 that he’d never seen officials use graffiti remover during a cleanup.
Trump has complained about graffiti in the District for years and touted the E Street encampment eviction and graffiti removal in a speech to members of the Department of Justice on March 14.
Shannon Clark — the director of communications for the Foggy Bottom-based mutual aid organization Remora House who was present at the eviction on March 7 — said District officials gave residents too little time to move, stressing unhoused residents who were suddenly at risk of losing their belongings.
Clark said she doubted residents offered rooms at The Aston could access its services because the facility’s bridge housing model is typically reserved for people moving into permanent housing soon, which isn’t the case for all unhoused people living near the E Street Expressway.
Clark compared The Aston arrangement to a 2021 incident where the District promised people displaced from a park at New Jersey Avenue and O Street housing at a hotel for a few days, but they did not ultimately qualify.
Clark said she imagines that the District will see an increase in encampment evictions moving forward, adding that DMHHS posted an additional eight encampment clearings for this month on its website, which are on top of clearings that they had already scheduled. The clearings include two sites in Foggy Bottom, on 26th and L streets and on Virginia Avenue and Rock Creek Parkway.
The Foggy Bottom ANC last week condemned the evictions and accused the District’s administration of treating unhoused residents of the ANC’s jurisdiction as “pawns to be used in service of the mayor’s political self-preservation” in a resolution passed last week.
The resolution requests that the mayor cease immediate dispositions within the jurisdiction of the Foggy Bottom ANC and offer an explanation for the ones that occurred on March 7 and 14.
The resolution highlights one case at 27th and K streets, in which D.C. officials moved people from the location in a scheduled encampment clearing on March 12 to a site that was scheduled to be cleared this week.
But D.C. officials cleared the site on March 14, despite initially scheduling the cleanup for more than 10 days later — evicting individuals from their new location within 48 hours with little time to prepare, preserve their belongings or maintain connections with social services.
“In these encampment clearances, people often lose possession of items that are personal property of theirs. If they move a longer distance, they may lose connections with social workers and other people who are providing services to them,” 2A09 Commissioner Sean Youngtone, who sponsored the ANC resolution said.
Malec, who voted for the resolution, said the apparent link between Trump’s Truth Social post and the rapidly scheduled evictions was troubling because the District’s failure to notify the ANC undermined its ability to give input. The ANC provides District officials advice carrying “great weight,” as granted by the ANC Act of 1975, and D.C. agencies must acknowledge the ANC’s input, though they aren’t required to follow it.
“I am, frankly, appalled that the administration appears to be governing as a proxy of Donald Trump’s Truth Social account,” Malec said. “It’s bizarre and unacceptable.”
The Socialist Action Initiative, a GW student group that engages in mutual aid in Foggy Bottom, rebuked the evictions and tied them to a broader crackdown by the Trump administration in a statement on March 12. The group also criticized local leaders for being “complacent” in the wake of Trump’s return to power and pledges to implement additional oversight over D.C.
“While Bowser claims that this was a prescheduled clearing and unrelated to Trump’s post, we question: Why were residents given only 24 hours notice?” the statement read.
