How Wisconsin’s Anti-Homeless Bills Reveal a National Strategy to Criminalize Poverty Through Copy-Paste Legislation
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in January 2024 and has been updated in April 2025 to reflect legislative developments.
In late 2023, Wisconsin lawmakers quietly introduced two nearly identical bills—Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669—that would force unhoused people into government-run camps, cut funding for shelters that don’t meet new performance benchmarks, and criminalize those who refuse to comply.
The Senate bill ultimately stalled, but it marked something bigger: the rise of template legislation that’s rapidly spreading nationwide.
“They’ll go into, like, an executive committee and vote when people aren’t around, which is very Wisconsin of ’em,” said Sherrie Tussler, CEO of Hunger Task Force (retired June 2024). “We’ve had a lot of stuff like that go along with our budget process. There is no public hearing anymore on a bill that’s pending.”
While this one didn’t pass, a slew of anti-homelessness policy followed quickly making this type of legislation the norm.
What Are State-Sanctioned Camps—and Who’s Behind Them?
Let’s call these facilities what they really are: state-sanctioned camps designed to control and punish people for being poor. Instead of funding permanent, affordable housing, Cicero-backed policies are pushing to redirect federal and state dollars toward the creation of temporary encampments.
These camps aren’t uniform—there’s no one-size-fits-all model. Their conditions vary depending on available funding and the requirements set by local or state governments. In Florida, for instance, HB 1365 mandates that local governments round up people sleeping outside and place them in state-approved regional camps—without providing the funding necessary to actually operate them.
It’s a dystopian vision masquerading as reform. Picture vacant lots lined with shacks no bigger than prison cells—no bathrooms, no electricity. Or rows of exposed concrete slabs where access to a dusty mattress depends on “good behavior.” These are not solutions; they are containment zones built to disappear the problem, not solve it.
And this is just the beginning. Here’s what you need to know—and what you can do—to stop these bills before they take a serious toll on our communities and our collective humanity.
The Rise of Template Legislation—and Why It’s Dangerous
Here’s what was happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.
Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 were examples of template legislation designed to further criminalize Wisconsin’s homeless population. Both bills were quietly introduced, according to outside sources who’ve attended their private meetings.
We sat down with Sherrie Tussler, who was serving as Chief Executive Officer for the Milwaukee-based nonprofit organization Hunger Task Force at the time of the interview. We aimed to use her 27 years of experience in the homeless sector to make sense of what was happening with Wisconsin legislation and to lay out the broader implications of what that means for all of us, housed and unhoused people, nationwide.
“We have this assembly bill pending in Wisconsin right now,” said Sherrie. “And it made it out of committee, the Senate’s Committee… Wisconsin is one of the most gerrymandered states in the US, and that may be up for a change, which is great news. But, as a result, there are a lot of very conservative people and people from rural areas who don’t know how to address homelessness.”
“And then they get an outside group, like the Cicero Institute suggesting legislation to them that they think is going to address homelessness from a different angle than Housing First, and they adopt it,” she explained. “That’s how that legislation sailed out of committee in a way that might blow most of us away.”
This Isn’t Just Another Bad Bill. It’s a Coordinated National Strategy.
Homelessness is on the rise across the US. And our government has, in recent years, been opting for policies that tend to favor criminalization over housing.
While anti-homeless legislation (laws that make it illegal for unhoused people to engage in life-sustaining activities such as sitting, standing, and sleeping) has always been on the books, what we are witnessing now is very different. This is a concentrated effort to push homeless people out of sight and into forced encampments.
Because it is being introduced by a massive conservative lobby and backed by corporate funding, there is a very real possibility that the Cicero Institute could be paving the way for thousands of copycat bills just like those listed above to flood the capital with corporate agendas all at once.
If passed, this template legislation could accomplish all of the following devastating results:
- Force homeless people into state-run encampments
- Withhold statewide funding for other homeless services like emergency shelters
- Perpetuate a homeless-to-prison pipeline
- Redirect funding that was originally allocated to build affordable housing
- Penalize governments that refuse to enforce these harmful criminalization policies
- Ultimately cause more homelessness while making it less visible by hiding it in plain sight
‘They Want to Disappear the Problem—Not Solve It’
“Over the past few years, as homeless camps have become more visible in the city of Milwaukee, we have responded more so with criminalization, jailing people, fining people, searching their tents, or removing their personal property while they were away, and even refusing to allow portable restrooms or hand washing facilities inside of camps,” said Sherri.
“The creation of internment camps, the finding of people who are homeless and outside of the camps, and the withholding of funding for shelter services until shelters can somehow prove that they’ve been effective, is just part of this corrupt strategy to address the visibility of homelessness without actually fixing the problem.”
How These Bills Pass So Easily—and Why Voters Don’t See Them Coming
“Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 went through this committee with a name that is bordering on ridiculous,” Sherrie explained. “I believe it was called something like ‘Housing, Rural Issues, and Forestry’. I don’t know how those things even go together.”
“Another unsettling element in all of this is the fact that it’s an out-of-state playbook,” Sherrie continued. “It’s fascinating to me that a group from outside of our state is going to influence what the public policy and even the law for our state would be about something as basic as putting a roof over someone’s head.”
“Our city, specifically, has been recognized nationally by HUD and others for reducing chronic homelessness through the Housing First strategy. Milwaukee is obviously in a cold climate, so house people, don’t let them freeze, and then address their issues,” Sherrie said. “Sadly, the Cicero Institute inverts that and says, take care of whatever’s causing their housing problem first, and then later they’ll get their own housing, which is kind of like Reagan’s trickle-down economics on a social service level. It didn’t work then. It’s not going to work now.”
The Lies Behind the Legislation
To sell the general public on their horrific blueprint to imprison homeless people outside, lobbyists at the Cicero Institute have to first lie about the true causes of homelessness.
Academics, advocates, and social service workers agree: the leading cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing. But Cicero ignores this glaring truth. We’re short more than 7 million affordable homes. Inflation is soaring. Wages haven’t kept pace. And most of the pandemic-era safety nets are gone.
The American Dream has collapsed onto itself like a dying star. And what does the government decide to build but a wasteland made of flammable shacks and windowless sheds. It is a shameful excuse for housing indeed.
“One of my staff did attend the meeting,” Sherrie told Invisible People. “And a gentleman from the Cicero Institute presented in favor, of course. Their position appears to be that homelessness is not a result of a lack of affordable housing or living wage jobs but instead about mental illness, domestic violence, and substance abuse. And so, they would prefer to create these internment camps and jurisdictions across Wisconsin.”
Everyone with any knowledge of homelessness knows that this idea that the crisis is fueled by personal flaws, as opposed to systemic failures, is an outright, bald-faced lie. If we aren’t cautious, it’s the lie they’ll build our future cities on.
Oppose Template Legislation. Talk to Your Representatives Today.
Sources close to this developing story suspect that both bills could be rushed through assembly and placed on the governor’s desk as early as this month, very quietly, quite destructively. Don’t wait. Contact your legislators now and demand they oppose copycat legislation that criminalizes poverty instead of solving it.
Editor’s note: Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 did not pass.
