Trump’s Homelessness Order Sparks Fears of a Return to the Asylum Era

LDI Expert Warns it Could Expand Forced Confinement of Those Who Are Homeless

June 16, 2026

By:

Dominic A. Sisti, PhD, MBE

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This op-ed originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 15, 2026.

For most of our nation’s history, involuntary psychiatric commitment operated with sweeping and often unchecked power: State hospitals confined people for years or even lifetimes based on such broad claims as mental illness and “moral defect,” often with little legal recourse.

Public outrage over abuses in overcrowded asylums — dramatized most famously in the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — helped propel the patient’s rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s toward successful deinstitutionalization. A series of court rulings limited the state’s power to confine people against their will.

Now that balance is shifting again.

Last summer, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14321, which purports to address homelessness by greatly expanding involuntary psychiatric commitments and encouraging police to arrest people experiencing homelessness.

The order — its constitutional validity remains in question — undermines decades of court precedent and removes judicial constraints to hold people in institutions. It could resurrect the old ways as a national standard without debate or congressional action.

Read the full op-ed here.