In June 2020, after learning that the City of Detroit displaced more than 40 unhoused individuals from encampments around the city, the ACLU of Michigan along with the National Law Center on Homeless and Poverty, Street Democracy, and students from Street Medicine units at Wayne State University and Michigan State University wrote a letter to the city urging an immediate cessation to all homeless encampment evictions during the COVID-19 pandemic unless the city could offer individual housing units to people living at those locations. The letter asked the city to adopt a policy that protected the unhoused population and their property based on guidance from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
In July 2021 the city approved a new policy that requires any removal of an encampment to be conducted according to CDC guidelines.
(ACLU Attorney Bonsitu Kitaba-Gaviglio; Tristia Bauman of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.)