President Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants homeless people off the streets of Washington, DC — along with the rest of the nation’s cities.

Alongside encampment sweeps, a key component of Trump’s homelessness policy is involuntary commitments, also known as civil commitments. The idea is to force an unhoused person into a facility to undergo mandatory drug or mental health treatments. That might sound extreme, but it’s a practice that has been around for decades — and it’s now gaining popularity across the country.

“We were committing people before we had medications, before we had electroconvulsive therapy,” says Alex Barnard, assistant professor of sociology at New York University and author of the 2023 book Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness. “This is something that’s been enabled by state law for hundreds of years, and when we look in the archives, we see the extent to which this tool was really abused in the mid-20th Century.”

That began to change in 1960, when the State of California issued a report describing these psychiatric hospitals as “a dust bin marked ‘miscellaneous’ to receive every problem that doesn’t fit a place in society,” Barnard says. But despite involuntary commitments’ spotty record, they’ve become an increasingly widespread intervention as America seeks to reduce the number of unhoused people. Barnard says these types of commitments only work best when paired with available housing.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke further with Barnard about the efficacy of involuntary commitments and about what he thinks about Trump’s initiatives on homelessness.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

President Trump has just issued an executive order that’s trying to change the way the US approaches homelessness and mental illness, largely by bringing us back to a more heavy-handed course of approach to homelessness, through the mental health system combined with greater criminalization of this population.

And his executive order is not just about the District of Columbia.

No, the executive order is nationwide. It’s trying to change policy really around three different issues. First, it’s trying to expand the use of civil commitments; that’s involuntary mental health treatment. It’s usually reserved for people who are a danger to themselves, danger to others, or unable to meet their basic needs. And he’s looking to expand that. It’s not totally clear........

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