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One day after an executive order focused on reducing nationwide homelessness was signed by President Donald Trump, the city of Rochester dismantled five unhoused encampments in the Northeast quadrant last week.
While city officials say the actions were taken in response to open-air drug activity, housing advocates view the actions in line with a history of encampment sweeps, lacking accountability for Rochester’s unhoused population.
“It’s a shame that the city’s doing this kind of stuff. I’m not sure who’s exactly making these orders,” says Edwin Rodriguez, a member of the Rochester Grants Pass Resistance. “This is the fourth sweep in the past few days that I’ve heard of. Morrill (Street) got hit a few times already in the past week.”
For Jose Cancel Perez, who had resided at the North Clinton Avenue encampment for two months, the morning of July 25 felt like starting over. Perez had previously found housing with the Father Tracy Advocacy Center and Motel 6 before living outdoors. With his tent and items strewn along the street, he claimed he had no other options.
“The police said, ‘Give me everything you can,’ took everything, and told me to go,” says Perez. “It’s mine. It’s all I have.”
Mayor Malik Evans has maintained he does not order encampment sweeps. City spokesperson Barbara Pierce says the activity seen Friday was not done in response to the unhoused, but rather in line with a Rochester Police Department crackdown on drug activity seen in the Northeast quadrant.
“I think it’s down to semantics. They don’t want to call this a sweep because they don’t want to be associated with the word,” says RGPR member Mickey Di Perna. “But the reality is they’re coming in, they’re taking people’s things, they’re putting it in a dumpster.”
RPD spokesperson Greg Bello says the activity on Clinton Avenue and Morrill Street was done in tandem with multiple narcotics-based search warrants in the area. Patrol officers from the Clinton Section, Community Affairs Bureau, and Special Initiatives Unit have patrolled the neighborhood in the past month to identify and eliminate areas involved in an open-air drug market, as residents have continued to raise concerns over the living conditions they face in proximity to widespread crime, Bello says.
“In the last several months alone, Morrill Street has had a person shot, a carjacking, shots fired, a gun arrest, and multiple rubbish fires,” the police department said in a statement. “The actual residents on Morrill Street do not deserve this, and today we took increased action to bring it to end.”
That explanation, however, does not satisfy housing advocates, who view the city’s actions as cracking down on unsheltered homelessness by any means.
“If we don’t want camps and tents all over the city, then we need to focus on the solutions that actually produce that, not just displacing people and removing them from the services that they need,” Di Perna says.
The Trump administration’s executive order, issued July 24, is aimed at cracking down on unsheltered homelessness, signaling a departure from previous policies that used a housing-first model and a human-centric approach.
The order calls for the involuntary detention or hospitalization of those who are deemed to pose risks to themselves or the public, providing assistance to municipalities that prohibit outdoor camping, drug use, and urban squatting. Funding and resources will be pulled from programs that promote the use of harm-reduction policies meant to aid those affected by substance-use disorders.
“The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats,” the order reads. “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.”
RGPR’s statement in response calls on the city and Monroe County to promote sanctuary for the unhoused and an end to encampment sweeps.
“Trump’s criminalization of poverty will only exacerbate the crisis of homelessness,” the group’s statement reads. “Rochester and Monroe County must pledge to defend our people against the federal government.”
Narm Nathan is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and a member of the Oasis Project’s inaugural cohort.
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