In recent weeks, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy claimed that Union Station in Washington, D.C., has been serving “more as a center for vagrancy than a hub for commerce and travel.” In a press conference, Vice President J.D. Vance claimed that the historic station—D.C.’s major transportation hub for trains, buses, and the Metro system—like much of the rest of the nation’s capital, was full of “vagrants” and “chronically homeless” people who ought to be removed.
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These comments aimed to justify President Trump’s recent decision to deploy members of the National Guard around D.C. But they also reveal the administration’s obsession with the specter of “vagrancy.” In March 2025, for example, Trump issued an executive order demanding the “prompt removal and cleanup of all homeless or vagrant encampments” in D.C. A separate executive order in July was national in scope, claiming that “endemic vagrancy” and “disorderly behavior… have made our cities unsafe” and promised to “fight vagrancy on America’s Streets.”
Given D.C.’s well documented low rate of violent crime, we should pay attention to this language focused on “vagrancy” because it offers evidence for what this crackdown is really about. Most politicians and activists use terms like “homeless,” “unhoused,” or “people experiencing homelessness” to describe the population the quotes above are referencing. But this administration’s actions demonstrate that its officials view people who fit these descriptions through a lens of crime, drug abuse, and mental health crises, with little attention to the economic and material factors shaping their situations. As a result, Vance, Trump, and others are turning back the clock on their language when discussing these issues, choosing to reference outdated criminal categories that haven’t been enshrined in law for more than 50 years.
But it goes beyond language, of course. By actively targeting visible signs of poverty through encampment clearance and arrests of unhoused people, the Trump Administration is trying to remove evidence of our economy’s failure to provide sufficient wages and adequate social services that would prevent people from living on the streets. The expansive definitions of vagrancy, and the discretionary power that vagrancy laws conferred upon law enforcement officers as a result, date back to the colonial era.
When British colonists settled the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries, they brought vagrancy laws and other legal concepts limiting the full enfranchisement and legal rights of poor people with them. Colonists and early Americans amended and adapted these laws with shifting social, economic, and political circumstances from the 18th century through the 20th.
Read More: Why Trump Sending the National Guard to L.A. Is Different From Its Deployment There in 1992
Colonial and early American local statutes and state laws criminalized many of the activities that low-income workers and people experiencing poverty engaged in for survival: frequent relocations, sleeping outdoors, and asking for assistance in public spaces. Municipal officials used vagrancy laws to define looking like a person who lacked “visible means of subsistence” as a crime.
These were “status offenses,” which could penalize people based on who they were and where they came from, not their actions. For example, New Jersey’s law from the 1770s was incredibly broad, “deem[ing]” as “vagrants […] all poor indigent persons strolling from their places of legal settlement.” Under New York’s 1820s statute, the state defined vagrants as “all idle persons, who, not having visible means to maintain themselves, live without employment,” as well as “all persons wandering abroad and lodging in taverns, groceries, beer-houses, out-houses, market-places, sheds, or barns, or in the open air, and not giving a good account of themselves.” Both states punished people who returned after being removed for violating vagrancy laws by public whipping.
Officials were strategic about enforcing these statutes, conducting daily arrests throughout the year, and major sweeps in autumn. People, including sailors or builders, who worked jobs that kept them solvent during temperate weather, might be left wageless as winter approached. Rather than provide food or temporary shelter for such workers in the colder months, municipalities would round them up and remove them, to save money and evade any responsibility to aid them.
In New York in 1817, the Common Council asked city marshals to “bring before” the committee “all such vagrants and street beggars as could be found” and commit “them to the Bridewell or Penitentiary.” In just a week, they arrested “nearly two hundred persons, having no legal settlement in this city, or visible means of gaining a livelihood.” The committee was certain that these individuals “would have remained during the approaching winter, to be a burthen upon public or private charity.” But the committee warned that even this roundup was insufficient; for these efforts to be “effectual, in relieving the city from beggars and poor…the same measures must be followed up with steadiness.”
Did these laws and roundups reduce need or expense? Many local government officials, reformers, and policymakers in the 19th century saw vagrancy laws as futile at best, cruel at worst. In 1851, for instance, the Board of Inspectors of the Philadelphia County Prison posed a crucial question to the Pennsylvania legislature: “why put a man in a cell because he has no home?” The inspectors argued that the laws governing vagrancy neither deterred crime nor aided the indigent transients incarcerated for vagrancy, who, they asserted, “deserve the designation of unfortunate rather than of criminal.” Effective or not, officials continued to press for expansive powers to police vagrancy because they were reluctant to give up a tool of social control that they could wield largely without judicial or governmental oversight.
In the antebellum era, vagrancy laws enabled enslavers to track and reclaim enslaved people who tried to free themselves by running away, allowing officers to arrest fugitives and return them to bondage. After the Civil War and emancipation, former enslavers utilized vagrancy laws to control the labor of formerly enslaved people, threatening those who refused employment on former plantations with arrest, incarceration, and servitude. Cities and states continued to use such laws into the 20th century to exclude, police, and disenfranchise African Americans, as well as others considered “undesirable”—among them, immigrant groups, political activists, and LGBTQ people.
By the time of the civil rights movement, broader social and cultural changes had strengthened individuals’ sense of personal liberty, and activism challenged policy brutality and discretionary overreach. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled vagrancy laws to be unconstitutional in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville. The majority argued that such laws gave enforcement officers extraordinary discretionary power to implement “vague” statutes, offering essentially the legal ability to arrest, incarcerate, and/or remove anyone they did not want in their community. Without these “umbrella” statutes, officials shifted tactics to outlawing more specific activities, including “public camping” and sleeping in one’s car.
Read More: America’s Laws Make us Bystanders to the Homeless Crisis
In recent decades, many communities made strides in strengthening the legal status of people experiencing poverty and homelessness through Housing First policies and incremental decriminalization. But last year, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson rolled back some of those gains, explicitly referencing 18th and 19th century municipal police powers embedded in vagrancy laws as precedent for today’s ongoing criminalization of homelessness. The decision laid the groundwork for D.C.’s removal of hundreds of encampments over the past year, well before the introduction of federal resources and troops to police D.C.
Yet the history of vagrancy laws shows that they were never about addressing thorny public policy problems like homelessness or crime, but instead about using state power to remove “undesirable” people from our communities. Encampment clearance, arrests, incarceration, and the demonization of people experiencing homelessness by using the archaic language of vagrancy laws exacerbate the social, economic, and personal circumstances that already challenge individuals’ subsistence and independence.
Today, when federal officials like Trump, Vance, Duffy, and others use the term “vagrants” to describe people experiencing homelessness, while sending federal troops to remove them from sight, they are calling upon a dark legacy intertwined with oppression, enslavement, and the revocation of the personal liberties of vast swaths of the population.
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (NYU Press, 2019).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.