On June 5 right-wing think tank the Cicero Institute held its first-ever homelessness policy summit, a Washington, DC, event promoting the criminalization of street-homelessness, as advocates with the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign gathered downtown in protest.
In 2021 Cicero produced a model bill, which legislators across the country have copy-pasted to become law, that calls for expanding the criminalization, surveillance and incarceration of people who live on public land. Cicero is the brainchild of Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who has written at length about his entrepreneurial interest in the “successful, beneficial prison.” In the lead-up to the summit, Housing Not Handcuffs published a memo highlighting the institute’s financial ties to industries that profit from its carceral agenda.
Cicero’s model bill criminalizes public camping as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one month in jail and a $5,000 fine. It coerces unhoused people into so-called structured camping facilities, state-run sites that could include forced psychiatric and/or substance use treatment as well as mandatory drug testing, with carceral or financial penalties for “failing.” Cicero has also been a loud opponent of Housing First, the permanent supportive housing approach without preconditions like abstinence. The model bill proposes to redirect funding from Housing First to “treatment first” models and unhoused detention camps. Cicero-inspired legislation has been enacted in 10 states.
The summit also follows the Louisiana Senate’s passage of HB 211, arguably one of the harshest such bills in the country. This Cicero bill would force unhoused people to “choose” between incarceration in jail or involuntary treatment. If they can’t afford the cost of that treatment, they may be forced to perform unpaid labor.
Housing First had a 20-year run and $4 billion a year. The federal government just killed it.
This will change homelessness in every city in America – including yours.
Housing First activists sued over the last attempt at major reform. But this time, they’ll have an uphill… pic.twitter.com/ACRYTq1iMm
— Cicero Institute (@InstituteCicero) June 3, 2026
The new research brief from Housing Now Handcuffs highlights Lonsdale’s ties to an organization called Social Purpose Corrections. While SPC is billed as a nonprofit, Lonsdale’s vision includes profitability.
“Believe it or not, not everyone involved in prison policy thinks profit is dishonorable,” the tech billionaire and Trump campaign donor wrote in a 2024 blog post, “certainly not myself.”
The brief also details how Lonsdale’s venture capital firm, 8VC, invests in various companies that profit from tech surveillance, prisons and policing, including from Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Through 8VC, Lonsdale also backs Citizen, an app that turns neighbors into vigilantes to report suspected crimes—often falsely. The brief shows Lonsdale’s connection to Gothams LLC, a company profiting from immigration detention facilities in Texas and Florida.
“That’s really what this is always about: the money,” Antonia Fasanelli, executive director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told the crowd at the June 5 protest. “This is not a policy debate about how to end homelessness. This is someone who plans or intends or maybe stands to get rich off of the lives of unhoused people.”
Lonsdale’s dystopian vision is gaining ever-deeper traction within the Trump regime. On June 4, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee released their 2027 funding priorities, which will almost certainly exacerbate the affordable housing crisis. Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said that the GOP bill, which slashes funding for public housing by $1.3 billion, will “put hundreds of thousands of low-income households at risk of eviction.”
🚨NEW REPORT🚨 Research has found that the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank pushing anti-homeless laws, has deep connections to the prison and surveillance industries, and may stand to profit from the same anti-homeless laws they advocate for. https://t.co/Eo5iMGdV1e
— National Homelessness Law Center (@homeless_law) June 3, 2026
Cicero’s influence in that bill is apparent. The think tank’s fingerprints are also all over Trump’s 2025 anti-unhoused executive order. In 2024 as SCOTUS considered Johnson v. Grants Pass, Cicero submitted an amicus brief in support of cities criminalizing people sleeping outside.
After a Cicero-inspired law was enacted in Kentucky, 178 people were charged with unlawful camping in just one county alone.
“In Kentucky, we’ve seen the dangerous legislation of the Cicero Institute incarcerate our people every day,” VOCAL-KY executive director Shameka Parrish-Wright told the protesters gathered June 5. “We know that generations … will be impacted by bad legislation and the things that groups like Cicero Institute are pushing.”
Donald White, representing the National Coalition for the Homeless, told the crowd that Cicero’s policy platform was an “old American pattern,” recalling how Jim Crow-era vagrancy laws targeted Black people “for being poor, unemployed or simply unhoused,” so that they could be “funneled into convict leasing and forced labor” that “powered local and state economies.”
“We can’t ignore that today’s policymakers once again are trying to make human survival a crime and call it public policy,” White said.
Image (cropped) via Arizona Judicial Branch
