Advocates Confront Monroe County Commissioners Over Winter Homeless Camp Evictions

Video: Advocates for unhoused people in Bloomington interrupted Thursday’s Monroe County Board of Commissioners meeting, begging officials to delay clearing at least two homeless encampments just as temperatures are forecast to drop well below freezing.

Staff report

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — December 4, 2025

A group of advocates for unhoused people disrupted Thursday’s Monroe County Board of Commissioners meeting, pleading with officials to postpone winter evictions at at least two homeless encampments as temperatures plunge below freezing next week.

“Don’t kill my goddamn friends,” one speaker shouted toward the commissioners after accusing the county of hiring contractors to “clean up trash” where people are living because shelters are “full” and “the shelters are shit.”

The outburst capped roughly half an hour of public comment from residents, former shelter clients and others, who asked commissioners to delay the camp clearings until April 1, 2025. Several said they feared people could die if forced to move their tents and belongings in the middle of a cold snap.

“I am begging you to move the eviction date into the spring when it is warmer,” one woman told the board. “Honestly, I don’t think it should be evicted at all, but we will compromise on that.”Another speaker, who said she had recently experienced homelessness, described having seizures while unsheltered and warned that people already “freezing outside” would lose the few places they feel safe. “People have lost their lives due to the cold,” she said, asking commissioners to show “mercy” and delay enforcement.

Notices and a cleanup crew

Last week, Monroe County posted eviction notices at encampments on county-owned land, including a site off South Rogers Street known as the Thomson property.

The notice at the Thomson property warns that storing personal property there violates Monroe County Code 257. It states that on Monday, Dec. 8, any personal property found at the site will be removed and held for one week at the Monroe County Highway Garage on West Foster Curry Drive. After that, unclaimed items “shall be deemed abandoned and subject to disposal” under county code. Unauthorized access to the site after Dec. 8 will be considered a violation.

If county staff decide items are trash, solid waste or a health hazard, the notice says they “may be disposed of immediately.”

County officials told the crowd Thursday that belongings left behind will be taken to the highway garage so people can reclaim them, and that the county has been coordinating with social-service agencies and the sheriff’s office.

At the same time, a private biohazard and remediation company, Bio-One NW Indianapolis, has posted a 10-day “Homeless Encampment Cleanup” job on a gig-work app in Bloomington. The listing advertises $28 an hour for workers to clear multiple wooded camps in early December, handling trash, needles and other debris and piling it for the county highway department to load into dumpsters.

The ad instructs workers that “most of what we will be interacting with will be trash, so don’t worry about being too picky,” while directing them to place “very personal” items in a separate personal-property dumpster “which the county will then take care of.” It describes a “chilly, drizzly and possibly windy” environment with “A LOT of walking” to and from the sites.

For activists, the language in the job posting and the county’s notices underscored their fear that people’s few possessions — tents, blankets, extra clothes, medications — will be treated as garbage.

“When you take people’s things that keep them alive and you consider it trash, you kill them,” one speaker said, citing past winters when unhoused residents in Bloomington lost fingers, toes and even their lives to the cold. A person froze to death on the sidewalk at Seminary Park after that camp was cleared several winters ago.

‘We’re here to listen, not to debate’

Thursday’s turn-out was organized in part through a flyer circulating on social media that urged residents to “oppose the unjust eviction of our homeless neighbors” at the commissioners meeting in the Nat U. Hill Room at the courthouse. The flyer encouraged people to bring friends, prepare three-minute comments and “stand up for human rights.”

Inside the meeting, commissioners Julie Thomas, Lee Jones and Jody Madeira listened as speaker after speaker urged them to intervene.

One woman referenced a conversation with a local homelessness-response coordinator who, she said, told her shelter capacity this week was “critical” and that there were not enough beds for everyone now living outside. Others described logistical barriers that make shelters inaccessible — distance, first-come-first-served rules, disability and mental-health challenges, and strict curfews and conduct policies.

Several asked the commissioners to spend a night outside before voting to support any eviction. One person invited them to bundle up with hand warmers, stand outdoors for hours and “understand the reality people will be forced into.”

Thomas thanked speakers but said the board would not debate the issue during the public comment period.

“We have heard from you,” she said, adding that the commissioners were also hearing from housed neighbors who support clearing the camps because of safety and health concerns in nearby neighborhoods.

Advocates responded that the county has had the authority to act since July, when the weather was warm, and questioned why it was choosing December — days after the season’s first snow — to carry out the removals.

“The commissioners just stated that they are choosing residents’ comfort over our unhoused neighbors’ health and lives,” an organizer told the room as the board tried to move on to other business on the agenda.

Echoes of The Grapes of Wrath

For some in the room, the looming sweep of camps on county land recalled John Steinbeck’s writing about Dust Bowl migrants and their roadside shanty towns nearly a century ago.

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck chronicled families forced off their land and pushed into makeshift camps that local authorities treated as a problem to be cleared away, not a community to be helped. His reporting on migrant “squatter camps” in California described settlements built from dump scraps along riverbanks, where residents clung to dignity while fearing the next eviction.

Steinbeck also wrote about the moral clarity he saw among the poor. “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people,” he wrote in The Grapes of Wrath. “They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”

On Thursday, it was mostly people with lived experience of poverty and homelessness who stood up for those in the camps — sharing food, building street-level aid boxes, volunteering in shelters and asking county leaders not to push their neighbors deeper into danger.

Another of Steinbeck’s lines, spoken by Tom Joad at the end of the novel, promises that he’ll be wherever “there’s a fight so hungry people can eat.”

At the Monroe County courthouse, the fight — at least for now — is over whether the people living in tents beside highways and in the woods will be treated as trash to be hauled off, or as neighbors whose lives are worth more than a clean property line and a cleared right-of-way.

For the advocates who interrupted the meeting, the demand was simple and urgent: hit pause.

“Move the evictions to the spring,” one speaker said.

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