After local officials banned camping in urban areas, rural sites swelled. Now, the U.S. Forest Service is cracking down.
The U.S. Forest Service closed about 26,000 acres of the Deschutes National Forest on Thursday after homelessness advocates unsuccessfully attempted to delay the project’s start.
Forest Service officials have said they need to clear vegetation in the area to prevent wildfires. They gave roughly 200 people living in encampments nearly four months of warning to collect belongings and find somewhere else to go.
National homeless advocates say the evictions show the Trump administration’s ineffective approach to a widespread housing crisis. That political framing has drawn national media coverage to what’s been a years-long effort by local and state officials to stop people from living on public land in Central Oregon.
In the final week leading up to the closure, people at the site near Bend were hoping for reprieve while trying to get themselves and their community out of the forest. On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected a request for a temporary restraining order that would have paused the camp removal.
Mandy Bryant and her dog, Dude, drove along Horse Butte Road with Jesse Rabinowitz the day before the May 1 closure.
Rabinowitz, the campaign and communications director with the National Homelessness Law Center, described the closure as the largest eviction of people living on federal land in recent memory.
He flew to Oregon from Washington, D.C., to meet with displaced residents. Bryant had been living in the forest for years with her boyfriend, Chris Daggett. Daggett is a third-generation Bendite, who said he used to judge people living unsheltered before it happened to him.
In Central Oregon, people living in tents or cars have been driven from urban areas. In Bend, urban encampments on Hunnell Road, 2nd Street and Emerson Avenue have generated controversies over the last four years. In 2023, city councilors voted to make it more difficult for people to live in tents and cars to continue staying within city limits. Under the banner of updating the city’s parking code last year, councilors voted to require people to move their vehicles every 24 hours.
Some people driven out of the city moved to more rural areas to the north, to an encampment known as “Dirt World.” Others moved south, to the Deschutes National Forest, which residents refer to as “China Hat” and “Horse Butte.” The Forest Service calls its plan to close this area the Cabin Butte project.
A recent point-in-time count showed homelessness in Bend has decreased, while increasing in surrounding rural areas. Deschutes Forest manager Holly Jewkes alerted local officials in a 2022 letter that city sweeps were pushing people onto federal land. Thursday’s camp removals have the potential to move people back into more urban areas with tight regulations and limited resources for services.
‘More complex than just a tent’
The week leading up to the Cabin Butte closure, both Bryant’s and Daggett’s vehicles broke down. Bryant called it “a perfect storm of adding onto an already stressful moment.” She said it seemed to be happening to a lot of people who were trying to get their things together to leave.
Mandy Bryant looks out into the forest in the Horse Butte area of the Deschutes National Forest on Apr. 30, 2025. Bryant moved out of the Deschutes National Forest just before the May 1 closure.
On Wednesday, Rabinowitz picked up Bryant and drove out to have a pizza party in the forest, a goodbye event for a community where some residents have lived for years.
In addition to national advocates, local volunteers from Bend Equity Project and The National Vehicle Residency Collective gathered to share food and support people getting their things together in the last hours before the closure.
County service providers, though, steered clear. Colleen Thomas supervises Deschutes County’s Homeless Services Outreach Team. She said staff would not be there, partly out of self-preservation. She said the impact of this closure feels “a lot heavier” than the sweeps in Bend.
“The folks in the Cabin Butte area, some of them may have been living in this area for four, five years,” she said, “so they’ve created community and their homes are much more complex than just a tent on a sidewalk.”
Bryant said that when new people would move into their area, the couple would keep their distance, but after getting to know each other, they started to form a neighborly rapport.
Eventually, they begin to lean on each other.
“Most of the people out here, they’ll give you something today even though they know they’re going to need it tomorrow, just because you need it that day,” she said.
As the afternoon grew long on the day before the closure, Shauna Roberson was trying to bag up clothes. She wore a brace to support her back and said moving was painful. Robson was one of the 80 people to file a disability claim against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in an attempt to slow the looming forest closure. Local advocates also sought a restraining order against the Forest Service last week, but a judge denied the petition.
As Roberson packed, a law enforcement officer had just been by.
“They were actually really nice today,” she said.
She said they told her that before midnight, “we gotta be on the other side of the gate.”
The next day, 40 to 60 people were still in the area, according to Rabinowitz, even as local and federal law enforcement were on site.