On June 5, a group of advocates led by the National Homelessness Law Center (NHLC) gathered outside a hotel in Washington, D.C. Inside, a billionaire-funded think tank, the Cicero Institute, was hosting a “Homelessness Policy Summit.”
The advocates said that finding solutions to homelessness wasn’t the real goal of the people inside. “What is this all about?” Antonia Fasanelli, NHLC’s executive director, asked the crowd. “Money. That’s what this is about.”
The Cicero Institute was founded by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire venture capitalist. Lonsdale is also a cofounder of Palantir, a tech company that works with the Trump administration and provides police and immigration authorities with surveillance tools. For years, often going undetected, the Cicero Institute has pushed model legislation across the country to criminalize sleeping outdoors.
The organization downplays the cost of housing as a driver of homelessness, focusing instead on mental illness and substance use (which are not the main drivers), and on fear of crime (homeless people are actually more often victims of crime than vice versa). One of its main talking points is its disdain for Housing First—the strategy of prioritizing getting homeless people into homes first (instead of requiring sobriety to qualify for an apartment, for example). The institute also holds service providers and cities responsible for rising homelessness and advocates expanding involuntary civil commitment of homeless people with mental health conditions and requiring substance use treatment as a condition of accessing housing.
Some of the conference protesters came from states where the organization’s influence on homelessness law has already taken root. “I’m here today to disrupt Cicero’s event because they’ve been disrupting things in our state for years,” said Lindsey Krinks, a reverend and director of advocacy at the homelessness outreach nonprofit Open Table Nashville. “In 2022, Cicero’s chief policy strategist testified in favor of a bill that made sleeping and camping in Tennessee on public property a felony.”
Jesse Rabinowitz, campaign and communications director at NHLC, gave periodic updates on the proceedings indoors. “Y’all, someone … left the conference to tell us what’s going on, and Cicero is in there saying that prisons are part of a social safety net,” he said.
“Never once in [the] Bible does Jesus say, ‘I was hungry and homeless, and God said to lock me up to profit from my misery,’” said Liz Theoharis, a reverend and executive director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice.
Conflicts of Interest
On June 3, NHLC released a research brief about the Cicero Institute, created with the help of the nonprofit research organization LittleSis. The research details the think tank’s conflicts of interest related to its homelessness advocacy, including its ties to Social Purpose Corrections, an organization that advocates for a nonprofit prison model, and Lonsdale’s connections to immigration detention and surveillance. Policies that criminalize homelessness also directly benefit Lonsdale through 8VC, his venture capital firm, which invests in Palantir; Citizen, a crime-tracking app; and Sauron, a home security company.
“It’s always been a question: Why does this billionaire tech bro care about homelessness?” says Rabinowitz. “Why are they so invested in spending their own resources in making it a crime to sleep outside? And this report presents compelling evidence that there’s a potential profit motive here.”
The research brief also details Lonsdale’s connections to Trump. The founder of the Cicero Institute donated to Trump’s campaign and “regularly meets with the White House and Pentagon,” according to the report. And the Trump administration’s homelessness policy has closely mirrored the Cicero Institute’s rhetoric. Although there is significant evidence that Housing First is an effective approach, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has repeatedly attacked it. The agency has pushed to shift federal homelessness spending from permanent supportive housing to transitional housing. On June 1, HUD released its latest Notice of Funding Opportunity for homelessness spending; it cites the Cicero Institute four times.
Criminalization of homelessness has steadily intensified in the U.S. in recent years. A major turning point was the 2024 Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which ruled that cities can legally remove encampments even when residents have no shelters to go to. In 2025, Trump issued an executive order that portrayed homeless people as a threat and called for more civil commitment. Particularly punitive policies have popped up around the country since then. Utah, for example, proposed building a 1,300-bed forced-treatment facility for homeless people, although the idea ultimately failed to gain the support it needed to move forward. On June 9, Louisiana passed a bill that criminalizes camping and has been criticized for opening the possibility of forced labor.
“We are very clear that, just like the Trump administration’s attacks on migrants and trans folks, [its] attacks on homeless people [are] in service of an authoritarian agenda,” says Rabinowitz. “We see the same themes of dehumanizing, scapegoating, othering, and … ultimately forcing people into camps that have been part of authoritarian regimes throughout history, playing out now.”
NHLC doesn’t usually engage in in-person protests or directly confront private actors like the Cicero Institute, Rabinowitz says. But changing times have called for new tactics. “We know that movements are successful only when they engage both in inside tactics like lobbying and writing letters, but also more outside tactics, like holding bad actors accountable and calling attention to the billionaire forces that are poised to profit off of anti-homeless laws,” he says, “and we are aware that in context of authoritarianism, which we believe we are in, silence serves those in power.”
Despite the onslaught of legislation criminalizing homelessness—and the influence of organizations like the Cicero Institute—advocates remain optimistic. “I still think that we are winning more fights than we are losing. Last year, there were 54 bills introduced in states that would have made it a crime to be homeless. … Advocates across the country defeated 80 percent of those bills,” Rabinowitz says.
“When Cicero came to Tennessee, y’all, we weren’t organized,” said Krinks, outside the conference. “But guess what? We’re organized now. This is gonna be a long fight, but one day, the walls they’re building to cage our friends will crumble.”
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