07/25/2025
Vermont Center for Independent Living Condemns Executive Order Criminalizing Homelessness
Montpelier, VT — The Vermont Center for Independent Living (VCIL) strongly condemns the federal executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” issued July 24, 2025.
This order mandates forced institutionalization of disabled individuals experiencing homelessness, promotes the criminalization of homelessness, and withdraws federal support from evidence-based solutions such as Housing First and harm reduction. It requires the collection of private data and conditions federal support on mandatory participation in programming. These policies are not only dangerous but profoundly inhumane and ineffective.
In Vermont, where the affordable housing crisis has reached historic levels and over 3,400 people experience homelessness on any given night, this order will further jeopardize the safety and well-being of our neighbors—especially those with disabilities and substance use disorders.
This executive order:
• Ends support for Housing First, a proven Vermont strategy that helps people stabilize and rebuild their lives.
• Promotes forced institutionalization by expanding civil commitment laws and undermining longstanding legal protections for people with psychiatric disabilities.
• Conditions federal funding on aggressive enforcement of anti-loitering and anti-camping laws, resulting in sweeps and arrests rather than housing and support.
• Targets harm reduction programs, despite Vermont’s leadership in opioid response strategies that prioritize dignity, safety, and survival.
• Encourages data-sharing between housing and health agencies and law enforcement, raising serious privacy, disability rights, and civil liberties concerns.
• By conflating affordable housing access with involuntary treatment compliance, the order threatens the rights and dignity of people with disabilities. Specifically, it requires recipients of federal housing and homelessness assistance to mandate substance abuse treatment or mental health services for participants diagnosed with substance use disorder or serious mental illness.
Sarah Launderville, Executive Director of VCIL and a woman living with a psychiatric disability who has resided in federally subsidized housing, shared: “I have been forced into so-called treatment situations, and experienced the harm from that programming. Policies like this strip away freedom, autonomy, and the fundamental right to live independently in the community.”
People with disabilities are disproportionately affected by homelessness, many of whom are survivors of institutionalization and trauma. This order would push them back into systems of control and surveillance, stripping away their autonomy and civil rights.
“In Vermont, we have worked hard to provide permanent supportive housing, peer services, and voluntary supports,” Launderville added. “This executive order ignores data and evidence, and instead relies on discrimination, stigma, coercion, and punishment.”
Vermont has a proud history of defending disability rights and responding to public health and housing crises with compassion and innovation—from closing the Brandon Training School in the 1990s to investing in mobile mental health teams and peer support. This order threatens to reverse decades of progress.
“This is not a plan to end crime and disorder,” Launderville continued.
“It is a plan to erase poor and disabled people from public view, at the expense of their freedom, safety, and even their lives.”
VCIL calls on Vermont’s congressional delegation, Governor Phil Scott, and local officials to:
• Uphold Vermont’s commitment to disability justice and trauma-informed, voluntary services.
• Continue funding Housing First, harm reduction, and permanent supportive housing across the state.
• Publicly oppose this executive order and any efforts to enforce it in Vermont.
This executive order is not about safety, it is about scapegoating and sidelining people who need support, not handcuffs. Vermont must act boldly and clearly: housing is a human right, and people with disabilities deserve support, not surveillance.
