Orange County officials and front-line workers are responding with a mix of concern and selective support to President Donald Trump's new executive order targeting homelessness, a sweeping directive that leans heavily on law enforcement, civil commitments and mandatory treatment.

Signed Thursday, July 24, the order calls for a reset on how federal and local governments address homelessness. It encourages states to expand civil commitments, which would allow individuals with serious mental illness or substance use disorder who “cannot care for themselves” to be held in institutions or treatment centers. It also directs federal agencies to defund “housing first” programs and instead prioritize cities that enforce anti-camping and loitering laws, remove encampments and require treatment as a condition of receiving services.

“Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” the president said in his executive order. “The number of individuals living on the streets in the United States on a single night during the last year of the previous administration — 274,224 — was the highest ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of these individuals are addicted to drugs, have a mental health condition, or both.”

The executive order doesn’t name California’s CARE Court, but the measures it lays out raise questions about how the program might be affected. CARE Court rolled out in Orange County in 2023 and lets judges create treatment plans for people with serious mental illness. The program is voluntary, which means no one is forced into treatment, unlike the president’s order, which pushes for more involuntary commitments to get people off the streets.

The order also declares federal dollars should not support “so-called ‘harm reduction’ or ‘safe consumption’ efforts that only facilitate illegal drug use.”

“I think the first thing is that we are short on details,” Michael Sean Wright, founder of Wound Walk OC, a street medicine team that treats sick unhoused residents, said Thursday after the executive order was announced. “My concern is that they emphasize the criminality versus relief from the suffering.”

Orange County Fifth District Supervisor Katrina Foley said she supports some parts of the order, including stricter enforcement and removing people from public spaces if they pose a danger.

“I’ve long felt that we need to have a greater sense of urgency around helping to move people who are either drug-addicted or drug-induced and cannot take care of themselves, into treatment, into housing, some way to help them,” Foley said. “In that respect, I agree with the president.”

“I agree with enforcing anti-camping in public spaces and we’ve already moved in that direction in Orange County,” she added.

Foley also opposes safe consumption sites, she said. “I’ve also been on record on banning the safe consumption injection sites, I do not support that. And so, in that sense, I agree with him.”

The order pushes federal officials to back civil commitment reforms such as those in California’s Senate Bill 43, which broadens the definition of “gravely disabled” and would allow more individuals with substance use or psychiatric disorders to be hospitalized or be placed in conservatorships. Although it was signed into law in 2023, counties were given the option to delay implementation until 2026. In December of that year, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to postpone the rollout, which Foley opposed.

“If we had implemented SB 43 here in Orange County, we would be a little bit further along with some of the civil commitments for individuals who truly cannot make decisions for themselves,” Foley said.

But Foley raised concerns about provisions that could allow federally funded health providers to collect and share medical information with law enforcement.

“I believe strongly in individuals’ rights and the right to privacy to your medical information,” she said. “I don’t agree with his order to allow federally funded health providers to forward private medical information to law enforcement. I don’t know why that is necessary to address this issue.”

“It’s a slippery slope on some of this, headed to mass incarceration than actually trying to help people. We don’t have enough treatment beds, and that’s what scares me about this order. Instead of having treatment beds in medical facilities, it sounds like he wants to put people in jails,” Foley added.

Wright echoed that concern. He also rejected the idea that unhoused people routinely refuse help.

“If you put that person in jail for 15 minutes and they come right back out, that’s not going to help them,” he said, adding that the issue is not being resistant to services. “There are so many people who have already said yes … but if it’s going to take months to get somebody to a detox bed, you’d be dead by then.”

Santa Ana Councilmember Johnathan Hernandez raised alarm over a section of the order that uses federal resources to ensure “detainees with serious mental illness are not released into the public because of a lack of forensic bed capacity at appropriate local, State, and Federal jails or hospitals.”

“This creates a larger issue for the taxpayer, having to pay for more incarceration, more jails, more facilities that are not addressing the root of these issues. Mental health is health care, it’s not an issue of criminalization. There’s no amount of jail time that’s going to take away the mental health diagnosis,” he said.

Hernandez said he believes the executive order will not help address crime and safety and will instead create “more hardship for people who are struggling.”

Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento was blunt in his assessment.

“This is yet another example of the administration rounding up people they consider undesirable,” he said in a statement. “Stripping individuals of choice and forcing treatment without stable shelter risks doing more harm than good.”

Sarmiento said he believes the approach would backfire without voluntary services and trust between providers and the unhoused.

“While access to treatment is essential, our policies must provide individuals experiencing homelessness with housing, health care, and full wrap-around services to ensure dignity and a true path to recovery,” he said. “The administration’s shortsighted goal to criminalize poverty and prioritize institutionalization over health care — without addressing the root causes of homelessness, such as the lack of housing, mental health care, and economic opportunity — is deeply concerning.”

But the federal and state governments 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,” Trump said in his order. “Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.”

An independent audit released in March found that Los Angeles city and county officials didn’t properly track how billions in taxpayer dollars were spent on homelessness. A statewide audit last year found that California also couldn’t fully explain where the money went or whether its programs were actually working.

Wright said he shares the public’s frustration, but questioned the long-term impact of encouraging the executive order’s steps for a crackdown.

“What’s it going to take? Maybe an order like this, as ridiculous as parts of it are? The frustration is real. People want something to be done,” he said.

But, he added, “the idea that you could just have an edict and say we’re going to sweep the criminality off the street, it’s not going to work. It’s never worked.”

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