A day after a federal judge dismissed Uptown Tent City Organizers’ lawsuit against the City of Chicago, the homeless organization’s attorneys are vowing to continue a court battle for the right of those who have been displaced by authorities to camp out in the streets.
The matter ended up before a federal judge in June 2017, and there the Tent City Organizers, represented by the Uptown People’s Law Center, expanded their case into a full constitutional complaint. UPLC claimed that the city was violating the homeless people’s First Amendment rights by not allowing them to assemble in their tents and use their tents as symbols of protest of the city’s housing policies; their Fourth Amendment rights by seizing and discarding their property; their Fifth Amendment rights because the homeless people didn’t receive a hearing before having their property confiscated; and their Eighth Amendment rights by effectively criminalizing homelessness. The city’s actions were “cruel,” Alan Mills of UPLC explains, and they amounted to “punishing someone for being homeless.”
In response to Schenkier’s ruling, Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the city’s Law Department, issued a short statement: “We believe that this ruling is consistent with the law, and the City of Chicago remains committed to a compassionate and consistent approach to providing homeless services while respecting the rights of this vulnerable population.”
