by Lukas Illa
In the waning hours of its 2024 term, the U.S. Supreme Court published its decision on Grants Pass v. Johnson, which criminalized the existence of homeless people. In the days that followed, homeless advocates in the Bay Area pointed to the fact that in his majority opinion, Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch cited the amicus brief filed by San Francisco officials eight times.
The City’s amicus brief, or “friend-of-the-Court” filing, urged the Court to overturn Grants Pass, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that found the southern Oregon city’s sweeping of unhoused people when it had no shelter beds to offer constituted “cruel and unusual punishment,” a violation of their Eighth Amendment rights.
Mayor London Breed and City Attorney David Chiu’s brief claimed that this ruling “severely constrained San Francisco’s ability to address the homelessness crisis.”
But let’s review the San Francisco claims that served as the basis for the draconian decision granted by the ultra-conservative bloc of the Supreme Court.
In describing the goals set out in their sweep operations, the City claims to be “storing certain property.”
As someone who has attended dozens of “encampment resolutions”—the City’s term for sweeps—I have heard firsthand the repeated refusals of City workers to “bag and tag” any belongings, even those that meet the standards of storage.
An additional claim made by the City: “These [encampment] resolutions are planned in advance and can cover an area of up to a few city blocks at a time. City workers go to great lengths to provide advance notice to those impacted by a resolution. …”
In fact, when a sweep begins, many residents are caught off guard, and instead of a sweep notice or—just imagine—an actual City worker informing them of an operation beforehand, they are woken by a cop shaking their tent, ordering them to come out.
Demarcated sweep zones never stop the City workers from forcibly taking the belongings of people who have managed to move outside the designated blocks.
The City also claims that the workers come across feces and rotting food, yet omits the fact that Mayor Breed attempted to cut over $1.2 million of funding for public restrooms in this year’s budget season and that the City has made no effort to install garbage receptacles near areas frequented by homeless people to sleep.
This false portrayal is purposeful.
The officials who drafted this amicus brief know that people living on the street have nowhere else to go when publicly funded shelters are full and only have waitlists to offer. They walk in lockstep with conservative justices like Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to eviscerate the few protections for homeless people from state violence—a move Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls “unconscionable and unconstitutional.”
And now, with the ruling she championed, Mayor Breed can collect her reward: the political points she will score in the run up to her re-election bid.
With the preliminary injunction now vacated, unsheltered San Franciscans will face incessant harassment from City workers and their housed neighbors alike; they will be fined and arrested for having the audacity to sit, lie, and even sleep, stuck in a cycle of further debt and incarceration for the rest of their lives.
And there will be Mayor Breed, smiling and waving, her political ambitions emboldened, as she has become one of the chief architects to the legalized cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people across the United States.
