The headache challenge that is prepared to fulfill Trump on day considered one of presidency

Donald Trump‘s agenda upon taking office on January 20 involves deporting millions of immigrants and revving the economy by cutting taxes, red tape and bureaucrats.

But a problem that’s rumbled for years has just exploded into a crisis and threatens the best-laid plans of the president-elect’s team.

He’ll return to the Oval Office after a staggering 18.1 percent jump in homeless numbers this year — according to eye-popping federal data released this week.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) counted more than 771,000 as homeless in January 2024 — a bitter legacy of the Biden administration.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to make housing more affordable for everyday Americans and to move vagrant camps beyond city limits.

But the snowballing crisis, which now sees 23 of every 10,000 people in the US unhoused, can only imperil Trump’s goals for his second term.

It most obviously complicates his plan for the ‘largest deportation’ in US history, given how many immigrants work without papers in construction.

In its 117-page report this month, HUD revealed that America’s crisis of unhoused people was spiraling out of control.

Homelessness overall jumped by nearly a fifth — but some populations were hit much harder.

The number of homeless children rose by 33 percent; the number of whole families facing a night outdoors grew by 39 percent.

Black people were more likely than others to be sleeping on the streets, in abandoned buildings, cars or shelters, it found.

California, the most populous state in the US, continued to have the nation’s largest homeless population, followed by New York, Washington, Florida and Massachusetts.

Officials attributed the steep rise to a lack of affordable housing, the end of pandemic-era protections and people being uprooted by natural disasters.

That included the 5,200 Hawaiians bedding down in emergency shelters after a deadly wildfire ravaged Maui in 2023.

They also blamed the flow of migrants across the Southern Border and into major US cities, stretching shelters and other services to their limits.

In New York City, for example, asylum seekers accounted for some 88 percent of the increase in sheltered homelessness, the HUD found.

Scenes of homeless drug addicts stumbling on sidewalks and fears of violence and petty crime have emerged as a national political issue, with Trump mentioning it at 2024 campaign rallies.

In a video on homelessness released by his campaign, Trump said ‘hardworking, law-abiding citizens’ were being sidelined and made to ‘suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few’.

He vowed to ‘ban urban camping’ and create ‘tent cities’ for the homeless on ‘inexpensive land,’ where they would get treated for substance abuse.

‘There is nothing compassionate about letting these individuals live in filth and squalor, rather than getting them the help that they need,’ Trump said.

Trump’s pick for HUD Secretary, former NFL player Scott Turner, has in the past opposed government housing welfare programs, calling them ‘destructive’.  

Trump’s deputy, vice president-elect JD Vance, has linked high housing costs and homelessness to the millions of foreigners who’ve jumped the border in recent years.

‘Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,’ Vance said.

Studies on whether immigration drives up housing costs, and whether a deportation blitz would lower rents, are not conclusive.

A mass removal of irregular immigrants would doubtless free up space in homes and shelters — but it’s not clear how this would lower housing costs.

It would also see undocumented laborers kicked out of the country, straining the construction sector and threatening the building of new homes.

Trump’s transition team did not answer the DailyMail.com’s request for comment. 

Still, Trump’s plan to get tough on homeless camps resonates with voters.

Two-thirds of US adults said homelessness was out of control and urged officials to move those sleeping rough into tented encampments outside towns and cities.

That’s according to a DailyMail.com/TIPP nationwide poll of 1,401 adults in January, at the time of HUD’s annual homeless count.

Democratically leaning responders to the poll were keener on resettling the unhoused.

Some 74 percent of them wanted the homeless moved on, compared to 64 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of independents.

Against this backdrop, Democratic mayors have begun taking a tougher line on the homeless encampments that lower local home values.

Communities — especially in Western states — have enforced bans on camping as public pressure grows to address what some residents say are dangerous and unsanitary communes.

That follows a 6-3 ruling earlier this year by the Supreme Court that found that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment.

Still, many homeless people and their advocates say sweeps and relocation policies are cruel and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The answer, they say, is more affordable housing, not crackdowns.

Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, California, is among the local Democratic officials who’s changed his tune on homelessness.

Pouring billions of taxpayers dollars into a ‘homeless industrial complex’ of housing non-profits only deepened the problem, Wells recently wrote for Fox News.

Progressives were ‘subsidizing the homeless lifestyle financially, eliminating laws that kept communities safe and clean, normalizing addiction and de-stigmatizing vagrancy,’ he added.

Instead, he called for ‘enforcing laws that prevent street living, while providing, and sometimes requiring, appropriate treatment.’

Likewise, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has signaled a willingness to work with Trump’s team on her city’s homeless problem.

Bass recently told the LA Times she was ‘on the same page’ as Trump’s officials over erecting temporary shelters on federal property.

The Democrat has been making progress against the scourge in America’s second-biggest city, the HUD report showed.

LA, which increased housing for the homeless, saw a drop of 5 percent in unsheltered homelessness since 2023.

Meanwhile, Dallas, Texas, which overhauled its homeless system, saw a 16 percent drop in its numbers between 2022 and 2024.

The HUD report also highlighted progress at getting more unhoused veterans into homes — their number dropped 8 percent to 32,882 in 2024.

There was an even steeper drop for unsheltered veterans, falling 11 percent to 13,851 in 2024.

Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said there was a ‘clear roadmap for addressing homelessness on a larger scale.’

‘With bipartisan support, adequate funding, and smart policy solutions, we can replicate this success and reduce homelessness nationwide,’ Oliva said.

The sharp increase in the homeless population over the past two years contrasts with gains the country had seen for more than a decade.

Going back to the first 2007 survey, the US made steady progress for about a decade in cutting homeless numbers, with a focus on unhoused veterans.

The number of homeless people dropped from about 637,000 in 2010 to about 554,000 in 2017.

The numbers ticked up to about 580,000 in the 2020 count and held relatively steady over the next two years of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Congress responded to the pandemic with emergency rental assistance, stimulus payments, aid to states and local governments and a temporary eviction moratorium.

The rates of homelessness have skyrocketed since those pandemic-era protections ended.