From the ACLU. This is appalling. Link in comments: President Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing states to criminalize unhoused people and institutionalize people with mental health disabilities and substance use disorder.

The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” directs the Justice Department to expand indefinite forced treatment for people with mental health disabilities or substance use disorder, and those living on the street who “cannot care for themselves.” The order also purports to eliminate federal funding for evidence-based programs, like harm reduction and housing first, that save lives, and directs federal funds toward cities and states that criminalize substance use disorder, punish people for sleeping outdoors, or enforce other laws targeting unhoused people.

The order also calls for sweeping federal data collection on unhoused people and those with mental health disabilities, raising serious concerns about surveillance, privacy, and how such data could be used to justify further criminalization. Instead of funding services or support, the administration is prioritizing profiling and control.

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Headlines about the executive order and the name of the order itself are misleading. It’s going after those with mental-health issues AND those who are unhoused, not just those who are unhoused and also have mental-health issues. Both scenarios are noxious, but the latter is even more noxious. The EO encourages the involuntary commitment of “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public” and does not specify a time frame for such commitment, only that it be “appropriate periods of time.” It also provides funds for state and local governments to implement this plan, meaning round up folks with mental-health issues. All of this should terrify you, enrage you, and be distilled as outrage that, when intersected with love, allows you to act.

The EO also requires those receiving funding to “share such data with law enforcement authorities in circumstances permitted by law and to use the collected health data to provide appropriate medical care to individuals with mental health diagnoses.” In other words, a registry of those with mental-health issues that must be created at the local and state level and shared with the federal government.

This is a criminal state criminalizing those harmed by the criminal state.

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The executive order applies in part to those with mental-health issues who are deemed unable to care for themselves. You want to know one of the things that makes folks with mental-health issues unable to care for themselves? Overmedication, especially with high-dose neuroleptics or polypharmacology that leaves folks living inside clouded, plodding bodies and minds.

This approach to treatment is exactly what the EO will reward local and state entities for foisting on people with lived mental-health experience. It will create a cycle that justifies continued institutionalization for the rest of people’s lives. This kind of overmedication is sometimes called chemical restraint. It’s basically moving the architecture of control and coercion inside the patient rather than having it surround the patient within a facility.

This EO wants both: chemical control and coercion, as well as external control and coercion. Look who will benefit from this dual approach. It’s not those living with mental-health issues. It’s not their families. It’s not their loved ones. It’s not our communities. It’s not our institutions. It’s not our arts. It’s not our places of worship. It’s not our spiritual centers.

It’s business, big business. We are what’s being manipulated, destroyed, within big business. And, oddly, within a government that’s getting bigger and bigger under this newfangled Republican rule. Police states are always big. They have to be.