During a Tuesday press briefing highlighting what he described as key achievements of his administration, President Trump said he had “[I] Signed an executive order to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums.” As reported by Breitbart, he continued, “We’re going to have to bring them back. Hate to build those suckers, but you’ve got to get the people off the streets.”
Reflecting on his upbringing in Queens, New York, President Trump recalled a facility known locally as “Creedmoor.” He recounted asking his mother why there were “bars on the windows,” and said she told him, “people that are very sick are in that building.”
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“I’ll never forget — I don’t know if it’s still there, because they got rid of most of them,” Trump added, drawing a direct line between the closure of such institutions and today’s homelessness crisis. “The Democrats in New York, they took them down, and the people live on the streets now. That’s why you have a lot of the people in California and other places, they live in the streets.”
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The President’s remarks echo his comments from an August 2025 interview with Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese, in which he was asked if he would “be open to the government reopening insane asylums for people with serious mental illness.” Trump responded by pointing to “states like New York and California” that had once operated extensive mental health facilities but ultimately released patients “into society because they couldn’t afford it.”
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“They used to have them, and you never saw people like we had, you know, they used to have them,” Trump said, arguing that earlier policies kept dangerous or severely ill individuals off public streets. “And what happened is states like New York and California that had them, New York had a lot of them. They released them all into society because they couldn’t afford it. You know, it’s massively expensive. But we had, they were all over New York.”
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For conservatives, Trump’s push to restore mental institutions underscores a broader critique of progressive governance that dismantled such systems without providing effective alternatives. By tying Democrat-led deinstitutionalization to visible urban disorder, the President is signaling that public safety, fiscal responsibility, and humane treatment of the mentally ill require a return to structured, secure facilities rather than the permissive policies that have left America’s streets crowded with the vulnerable and the untreated.
