As I've been warning for years now, as soon as the Trump regime had the logistics in place for mass detentions and deportations like it has been building for the last 18 months, with camps, ICE recruits, and the private for-profit prison industry leading the way to run the show, the Trump regime was always going to eventually use that machinery on US citizens it felt were undesirable.
Now the regime is signaling the time to turn that dark power against the US people has arrived, and the purge will start with America's homeless population.
A team of Trump administration officials toured a California facility once used by the Federal Aviation Administration this week as they searched for a potential site to relocate homeless people, according to three government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private tour.
President Trump has directed aides to launch a major crackdown on homelessness in California, spurring an effort across multiple government agencies to determine how to deal with sprawling tent camps on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities, officials said.
Trump is expected to visit California on Tuesday and Wednesday. One administration official with knowledge of Trump’s visit to California said there were discussions about an announcement related to California’s growing homeless problem next week, but a second official said that any decision could be premature and that it was not on the current schedule for the trip.
Trump has asked aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets,” one senior administration official said.
The FAA facility toured by administration officials is located in or near Los Angeles, but its precise name or whereabouts — or whether it is a current or former government facility — were not immediately known.
It also remains unclear how the federal government could accomplish getting homeless people off the streets of Los Angeles, or what legal authority officials would use to do so.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the administration is considering razing tent camps, creating new temporary facilities or refurbishing government facilities as part of Trump’s directive on homelessness. The changes would attempt to give the federal government a larger role in supervising housing and health care for residents.
Pay attention. This is the part where people disappear off the streets and get put in facilities run by ICE, citizenship be damned. We'll get rid of homelessness by rounding up the homeless and putting them in camps.
And then maybe they go away.
Some administration officials expressed skepticism that the federal government wanted to get in the business of operating a large homeless shelter in Los Angeles. There were also questions about the feasibility of turning the FAA facility into a shelter and how it could legally be done.
One administration official with knowledge of Trump’s visit to California said there were discussions about a homelessness announcement next week.
Senior administration officials said that forcing people into new facilities was not under consideration, with one official telling The Washington Post: “We’re not rounding people up or anything yet. You guys in the media get too ahead of yourselves.”
We're not rounding people up or anything yet.
It's like a bad sci-fi cable movie, only it's real.
Los Angeles officials were blindsided by news of the sweeping plans being considered by the administration for the city’s homeless population. Some had thought White House officials were arriving this week to simply learn more about the issues.
The administration’s delegation divulged little information to city officials about what they were doing in Los Angeles when they were not with city representatives.
“They were very cagey with us about what they were doing,” said a Los Angeles city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “Our only understanding from them coming into this was they wanted to poke around and learn more about what we were doing out here. All this stuff about cracking down and sweeping people out of skid row was a total surprise to us.”
The Trump administration team also met for an open-ended discussion about homelessness with the Los Angeles police union, according to an official with direct knowledge of the meeting, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Gotta get the cops in on the fun. If you ever entertained the thought that this was going to stop with undocumented immigrants, have I got hundreds of years of authoritarian history for you.
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