Trump Claims He Signed Order To Bring Back Mental institutions
In a striking policy declaration that’s already setting off a new round of national debate, President Donald Trump announced this week that he has signed an executive order to bring back mental institutions and asylums—arguing it’s a necessary step to address the growing crisis of homelessness and public safety in America’s cities.
“Hate to build those suckers, but you’ve got to get the people off the streets,” Trump said candidly during a press briefing. The line, typical of Trump’s blunt and unvarnished rhetoric, speaks to a deeper frustration many Americans share: major cities have become unrecognizable, plagued by tent encampments, spiraling addiction, and untreated mental illness.
And Trump isn’t wrong when he traces some of this decline to the dismantling of mental institutions decades ago. What once were guarded treatment centers have been replaced with sidewalks littered with suffering souls—many of whom aren’t just down on their luck but are battling severe, untreated psychiatric disorders. In the name of “deinstitutionalization,” we cast thousands of people into the streets and called it compassion. The results have been tragic and obvious.
JUST IN – President Trump: ‘Signed an executive order to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums. We are going to have to bring them back. Hate to build those suckers but you’ve got to get the people off the streets’
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) January 20, 2026
Trump referenced “Creedmoor,” a mental hospital in Queens that he remembered from childhood, asking his mother about the bars on the windows. It was a formative moment, one that stuck with him—and now appears to be fueling a policy vision that’s rare in its clarity. While others tiptoe around the issue, Trump is blunt: we need to fix this.
And it’s not just New York. Cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago have become synonymous with scenes of chaos. Asylums and mental hospitals were shuttered under the promise that community-based care would take their place. But the funding never arrived, and now the communities—and the vulnerable people in them—are paying the price.
In his earlier interview with the Daily Caller, Trump pointed out how economic pressure, not moral reform, led to the closure of these institutions. “They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it,” he said. That observation cuts through years of ideological spin. States tried to save money—and in the process, pushed mentally ill individuals into prisons, shelters, and streets.
The truth is, modern America has few answers for people with deep mental health needs. Emergency rooms can’t hold them. Police aren’t trained to treat them. And families are often powerless to intervene.
Trump’s plan may face political resistance, especially from those who see the idea of reopening asylums as a return to an outdated model. But his argument isn’t about the past—it’s about solving a crisis that’s become too big, too tragic, and too obvious to ignore. Cities cannot flourish while their streets double as open-air wards.