WASHINGTON — Ms. Jay didn’t wait for the authorities to come before packing her tent and carrying what belongings she could across Pennsylvania Avenue on her way to whatever comes next.
She’d been living her “Girl Scout life,” she said, saving money and looking for work while homeless. When she got word that the law was on its way, she found herself living the scouting motto: Be prepared.
“Last night was so scary,” she said, recalling when federal law officers, in concert with local police, began fanning out across Washington to uproot homeless encampments. “I don’t want to be the one to wait until the last moment and then have to rush out.”
President Donald Trump’s housecleaning started with official Washington and the denizens of its marbled buildings, back in the bureaucracy-scouring days of the Department of Government Efficiency. Now he is taking on the other side of Washington, having sent some 800 National Guard troops to help local police go after crime, grime and makeshift homeless encampments.
Back in early spring, Trump’s efforts upended the U.S. Institute of Peace, among other institutions and departments. On Thursday, authorities brought in an earth mover to clear out an encampment within sight of that hollowed-out institute’s handsome Constitution Avenue headquarters.
The mission to clean the capital of criminal elements and ragged edges comes under Trump’s Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force. Some in D.C. believe a different kind of ugliness is playing out.
“From the White House, the president sees a lawless wasteland,” said leaders of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. “We see fellow human beings — neighbors, workers, friends and family — each made in the image of God.”
For Andrew S., 61, the ugliness came Wednesday when agents he identified as being with the federal government treated him like an eyesore. They asked him to move from his resting place along the route where Trump would be driven to the Kennedy Center.
“You have to move because you’re in eyesight of the president,” Andrew, originally from Baltimore, said he was told. He added, “I didn’t really take it serious until today, but the president really doesn’t want us here.”
He, Ms. Jay and some others interviewed and photographed by The Associated Press declined to give their full names in the midst of the heavy law enforcement presence in Washington.
At the encampment near the peace institute, a man named George, 67, walked away Thursday carrying an umbrella in one hand and a garbage bag with some of his belongings in the other. City workers put his mattress and other possessions in a garbage truck idling nearby. He waved goodbye to it.
It was that kind of day for others at the same site, too.
“I have known homelessness for so long that it is part of normal life at this point,” Jesse Wall, 43, said as he cleared his belongings Thursday from the site near the peace institute. “What are you trying to prove here?” Wall asked, as if speaking with the law. “That you’re a bully?”
David Beatty, 67, had been living at that encampment for several months. On Thursday, he watched as parts of it were roped off. Beatty and others were allowed to pack up what they could before the heavy machinery cleared remaining items from the area and dumped them into trucks and receptacles.
He quoted a variation of the Bible’s Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — and said, “The idea that he’s targeting us and persecuting us feels wrong to me.”
Much of the clearing out Thursday was at the hands of local police. D.C. officials knew federal authorities would be dismantling all homeless encampments if local police didn’t. Wayne Turnage, a deputy mayor, said the district has a process to do it “the way it should be done.”
The expectation was clear, if not overtly stated: Local police would go about the work in a more humane way than the feds.
Jesse Rabinowitz from the National Homelessness Law Center said that, according to the briefing he received on the operation, people would be given the choice to leave or be detained at eight federal and 54 local sites. The intent, Rabinowitz said he believed, was to trash tents in the daylight (because authorities want the public to see that) and do the bulk of arrests in darkness (because they don’t want that widely seen).
Born and raised in Washington, Wesley Thomas spent nearly three decades on the streets, struggling with drug addiction, until other homeless people and charitable organizations helped him get clean through therapy and back on his feet.
Now he has had a place to live for eight years and works as an advocate for a nonprofit group that supported him, Miriam’s Kitchen, where he’s helped dozens find housing.
“The first day I was out there I was penniless, homeless, frightened, only the clothing on my back, didn’t know where I was gonna sleep nor eat,” he said. “Fortunately, there were some homeless people in the area, gave me blankets, showed me a safe place, St. John’s Church, to rest my head for the night.”
St. John’s is across from Lafayette Park, which is across from the White House. It is known as the Church of the Presidents, because its sanctuary has seen all presidents since James Madison in the early 1800s.
Thomas wanted the public to know that most of the people being moved off are not “uneducated, dumb or stupid,” even if they are down on their luck. “You got doctors, lawyers, businessmen, Navy SEALs, veterans, mailmen,” he said.
“Poor people come in all races, ethnicities and colors.”
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Kinnard reported from South Carolina. Associated Press journalist River Zhang contributed reporting.
