I live in Washington, DC and I am the Policy Director for a homeless services agency called Miriam’s Kitchen. Since Trump won the election, we have been involved in organization efforts to both plan for and then defend potential threats that the Trump Administration poses across numerous issue areas. The week after the election last November, I attended the first convening of Defend DC, a loose coalition of organizations that operate in a number of different sectors — homelessness, immigration, education, healthcare, labor, political autonomy, criminal justice, LGBTQ+ and more — to begin confronting the many threats that might and would become an issue for DC residents. The idea was to bring together organizations already working in these spheres and plugging interested individuals into groups already doing the work, rather than trying to build any sort of new organization or efforts. In my role as Policy Director, I have been the main representative from my organization, and from the homeless services community as a whole.

One of the organizations that has also participated in Defend DC is Free DC, an organization that is devoted to DC’s autonomy and leading the charge to bring statehood to DC. They have been doing vast amounts of organizing and training and sponsoring numerous protests and rallies. They have also been holding advocacy days in congress for residents of DC to go and speak to members of congress about specific issues. Miriam’s Kitchen works with Free DC to help them with their messaging on homelessness, as attacks on the unhoused are part of the Trump administration’s federal occupation of the city.

To that end, since the middle of August especially, I and my colleagues have been responding to those attacks and doing everything we can to ensure that our unhoused neighbors are safe and stay out of harm’s way. We have been working to get people into shelters and into housing, if they are connected to a housing resource, as fast as we are able. We have been pushing back on the narrative that the unhoused are merely criminals and drug addicts by doing many interviews in the press, locally, nationally, and internationally. Personally, I am using my own social media accounts to try to counter the narrative as well. Finally, my colleagues and I are now communicating with homeless services providers in other cities Trump has threatened to bring the US military to, helping them to plan for potential eventualities and sharing lessons learned over the last couple of months.