New Federal Bill to Ban Registrants from Homeless Shelters
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has introduced legislation that would bar registered citizens from entering federally funded shelters. It’s called the ‘Safe Shelters for Survivors Act of 2026’.
The proposal overlooks a glaring and uncomfortable reality. A disproportionate share of the homeless population is made up of people on the registry — not because they choose homelessness, but because a dense web of laws makes stable housing and employment extraordinarily difficult to obtain. Residency restrictions carve entire cities into exclusion zones. Employment barriers close doors before an application is even considered. And even where the laws does not explicitly prohibit housing or work, the stigma attached to the registry often does the job. Landlords refuse to rent. Employers decline to hire. The outcome is not surprising.
Here’s the paradox: registry laws create homelessness, and then new laws punish the very homelessness those policies helped create. Proposals like this one would cut off access to shelters — the very places designed to keep people off the streets. What, exactly, is the intended result?
In states like Florida, the contradiction is even more stark. Florida has some of the strictest residency restrictions in the nation, and local ordinances have produced well-documented housing instability. Now add Section 125.0231, Florida Statutes — enacted in 2024 through House Bill 1365 — which criminalizes public sleeping and camping. Consider the sequence… restrict where someone can live so they wind up homeless, deny access to shelters so they have to sleep on the streets, and then criminalize sleeping outdoors. Where is that supposed to lead? If a person cannot legally reside in broad swaths of a community, cannot enter a shelter, and cannot sleep outside, what option remains other than incarceration?
You can contact Rep. Mace here: https://mace.house.gov/contact. If you get a meaningful response (not an auto-responder), you can share it below.
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I just read she is introducing another bill that will introduce the death penalty to sex offences involving minors. Including amending the Uniform Code of Military Justice to authorize the death penalty for rape of a child under Article 120b.
As a teenager Nancy Mace was raped. She has also been working in her home state of SC to create increasingly stricter sex offender laws. I firmly believe she has not fully healed from her trauma and has made it her mission to use her trauma as a weapon against all and every level of sex offenses. When I watch and listen to her speak I see and hear it in her voice and body language. There is also a Florida congressman that is wanting to pass a federal law that denies those forced to register, I believe Medicare. These are two of many that we all need to push back on.