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What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk shares our most recent publications and other resources to help you stay informed about Oklahoma. Numbers of the Day and Policy Notes are from our daily news briefing, In The Know. Click here to subscribe to In The Know.
This Week from OK Policy
Housing ends homelessness. Confinement makes it worse (Commentary): President Trump recently signed an executive order expanding forced institutionalization of unhoused people with mental illness or substance use disorders. His administration has branded it as an act of “compassion” and “public safety.” Stripped of its veneer, it is neither. The measure tramples basic rights and drags America backwards in addressing homelessness. Such approaches have a long history of failure. They punish people for the conditions of poverty while failing to address the true drivers of homelessness and mental illness. [Kati Malicoate / OK Policy]
WATCH: Private Immigration Detention in Oklahoma: Watonga & Sayre deserve better than CoreCivic’s broken promises (video): CoreCivic, a private prison company with a terrible history in Oklahoma, is pushing to reopen shuttered Oklahoma prisons in Watonga and Sayre — this time as immigration detention centers. OK Policy’s Gabriela Ramirez-Perez and Polina Rozhkova sat down with us to explain why facilities are bad for community well-being and what we can do to stop them from reopening. [OK Policy on YouTube]
Breaking Oklahoma’s cycle of incarceration requires coordinated efforts, investments (Capitol Update): Poor educational attainment, housing instability, lack of earning skills, untreated drug and alcohol abuse, racial and gender discrimination — especially aggravated in Oklahoma by the over-representation of minority and female incarceration — contribute to over-incarceration, which then creates a cycle that becomes generational. [Steve Lewis / Capitol Update]
Policy Matters: Outrage sells, but we’re paying the price: Scroll through your phone for five minutes and you’ll quickly find that outrage sells. Politicians and wannabe political influencers aren’t scoring points by thoughtfully considering opposing viewpoints, but by labeling their opponents as enemies. As a result, corporations and politicians profit when we click, share, and engage in heated discussions. Meanwhile, the algorithms keep us scrolling. As a result, we’re turning into a country more divided, cynical, and increasingly less able to solve our shared problems. [Shiloh Kantz / OK Policy]
Weekly What’s That
Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)
The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) is an option available to most schools and school districts that allow them to serve free meals to more children at less expense. CEP allows schools and districts that serve a certain threshold of low-income students to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without determining eligibility for individual households. Schools are able to use administrative savings to offset any additional costs, over and above federal reimbursements, of serving free meals to all students.
In 2024-25, 844 Oklahoma schools in 267 school districts, serving a total of 277,449 students, participated in CEP, according to data from the Oklahoma State Department of Education. The largest participating districts were Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Lawton, Putnam City, and Midwest City-Del City. In fewer than 20 of the state’s 540 districts are no schools eligible for CEP.
The benefits of CEP include reduced childhood hunger, elimination of school meal debt, reduced stigma associated with free meals, decreased administrative burden for schools, and improved academic achievement, according to a 2022 report from FRAC.
Look up more key terms to understand Oklahoma politics and government here.
Quote of the Week
“To break the cycle of hospitalization, of homelessness, we need to engage people. We need to build relationships. Befriending people and gaining their trust is the key to breaking the revolving door of homelessness, criminalization and hospitalization.”
– Dr. Xavier Amador, speaking to a room full of Tulsa’s mental health professionals, first responders, and caregivers learning how to better support people living with mental health conditions with compassion and understanding. [Public Radio Tulsa]
- From OK Policy: Housing ends homelessness. Confinement makes it worse.
Op-Ed of the Week
America is finally waking up to Trump’s cruelty toward immigrants
Americans are still firmly behind President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, but it appears that at least some of them are getting cold feet as his brutal tactics come into view.
The spectacle of masked agents smashing car windows, detaining folks with no court hearings and deporting some of them to dangerous countries like El Salvador and South Sudan is starting to splinter public support. The reality is jarring, and for a growing number of Americans, it’s becoming too much to stomach. I just wish more of them would see it now before more people get swept under Trump’s indiscriminate campaign against migrants – legal or not.
Let’s start with the numbers.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 62% of voters still support deporting undocumented immigrants, and just over half approve of Trump’s overall handling of immigration. But beneath that top-line support is mounting discomfort.
Nearly 6 in 10 Americans opposed deporting people without court hearings or legal review. Independents, a key voting bloc, are especially critical.
Most say the administration has gone too far, specifically when it comes to detaining and deporting individuals who’ve never had a chance to see a judge. The policy of offloading migrants to third-world countries – even countries that they are not from – should strike many more as not just impractical, but also fundamentally un-American.
This tells us something important and gives me a bit of hope.
Americans want stronger border security, but enough of them aren’t ready to abandon due process. They might have begun to reject the spectacle of lawlessness cloaked in the language of “law and order.”
Yet, cheers persist, which is why we must never stop speaking up.
The slow public reaction and the applause for harsh enforcement reveal a darker side of the American psyche – a creeping comfort with dehumanization, a willingness to look away from suffering as long as it happens to “others,” in this case, to migrants whom MAGA wants out of the United States at any cost…
Numbers of the Day
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88% – Evidence from a systematic review of 26 studies indicates that Housing First programs decreased homelessness by 88% and improved housing stability by 41%. When compared to treatment first programs, clients in stable housing experienced better quality of life and showed reduced hospitalization and emergency department use. [National Low Income Housing Coalition]
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24% – The provisional decline in U.S. drug overdose deaths for the 12 months ending in September 2024 compared to the year prior. Despite this encouraging drop, overdoses remain the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18–44, underscoring the need for sustained prevention and treatment efforts. [Center for Disease Control and Prevention]
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144% – For every 100 inpatient hospital beds designated for psychiatric treatment, 144 are being utilized, stretching providers’ capacity to treat patients who need mental health care and resulting in providers relying on other resources to try and meet demand. [CBS News]
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19 – There have been 19 reported incidents of threats and harassment against local officials in Oklahoma between January 2022 to July 2025. [Bridging Divides Initiative via KOCO]
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62% – A Pew Research poll found the share of Americans who say free speech is very important increased from 56% in 2024 to 62% in 2025. Meanwhile, 32% of people polled said people in the U.S. are completely free to say what they want, up from 28% in 2024. [Pew Research]
What We’re Reading
- The Trouble With Trump’s Homelessness Plan: A new executive order seeks to shift homelessness policy toward mandated civil commitment and institutional treatment, reducing support for “Housing First” programs that prioritize getting people into housing without preconditions. The order encourages using federal incentives to promote stricter enforcement of laws against urban camping, loitering, and public drug use, and supports expanding involuntary mental health treatment — even when community-based alternatives are rare or underfunded. Experts warn that this approach risks violating civil rights, is costly, and fails to address the root causes of homelessness (such as housing unaffordability and lack of supportive services). [The Marshall Project]
- ‘Ecosystem’ Approach Gives States Hope in Fighting Overdose Crisis: State leaders are adopting a coordinated “ecosystem” approach to the overdose crisis that aligns public health, criminal justice, health care, emergency responders, and peer support into a unified response model. Emphasizing real-time data, broader access to naloxone, EMS-driven interventions, and initiation of treatment in emergency departments strengthens early detection and connection to care. Tailored, state-specific action plans developed through collaborative, interdisciplinary sessions signal a shift toward pragmatic, cross-sector solutions for overdose prevention. [National Conference of State Legislatures]
- Proposed Federal Budget Cuts Could Exacerbate the Behavioral Health Crisis: President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget requested $31 billion in cuts to the discretionary budget for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The cuts to grant funds would magnify Medicaid losses, leaving even fewer resources for community-based providers and causing many to shut down. [The Commonwealth Fund]
- ‘Rough road ahead’: Charlie Kirk’s assassination highlights the rise in US political violence: Today’s political and rhetorical landscape is intensely polarized and fueled by anger, distrust and conspiracy theories. It’s easier to target your political opponents for violence if you see them as “enemies of the nation.” Where does this enmity come from? Experts point to several sources, including social media, which exacerbated the high-voltage talk that had already existed for two decades in talk radio and cable news and “made it possible for violent rhetoric to reach vast numbers of people.” [PolitiFact]
- The Government’s Growing Trove of Social Media Data: Reviewing individuals’ social media to conduct ideological vetting has been a defining initiative of President Trump’s second term. As part of that effort, the administration has proposed expanding the mandatory collection of social media identifiers. The proposal would widen the government’s social media surveillance dragnet to include not only travelers, visa applicants, and visa holders, but also their U.S. citizen contacts. By linking individuals’ online presence to government databases, officials could more easily identify, monitor, and penalize people based on their online self-expression, raising the risk of self-censorship driven by fear of misinterpretation or adverse consequences. [Brennan Center for Justice]
