Homelessness in California is a national security problem, too

Angelenos were rightly alarmed to learn last month that the number of homeless people is rising again. But the reality is even worse. Homelessness is no longer just a local issue. It is a national security problem.

A significant number of the people living in tents on California’s sidewalks are not there because they lost a paycheck. They are there because they are addicted to a chemical weapon manufactured in China, smuggled through Mexico by cartels the United States has now designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and delivered through the same California ports and highways that carry the rest of our economy.

The state’s own data tell the story. Overdose is now the leading cause of death for unhoused Californians. In San Francisco, fentanyl is present in the majority of overdose deaths on the street. 

LA County Public Health reports the same. Behavioral health surveys consistently find roughly one in three unhoused Californians admits to regular illicit drug use, and independent researchers put the real number significantly higher when methamphetamine and fentanyl are counted together.

Where do the drugs come from?

They come from China. Chinese chemical companies in Guangzhou, Wuhan, and Shandong manufacture the precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels cook into finished fentanyl. 

The State Department sanctioned Guangzhou Tengyue Chemical last September and accused Beijing of “actively sustaining and expanding the business of poisoning our communities.” 

That is the U.S. government formally accusing a foreign adversary of running a chemical warfare campaign against Americans, and the finished product from that campaign is what is killing our neighbors on Skid Row, in the Tenderloin, and along the Santa Ana riverbed.

The Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), both now designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the Trump administration, run the industrial synthesis operations on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

Chinese money launderers wash the proceeds back through LAs real estate, Bay Area shell companies, and West Coast underground banking. Every step in that chain is a national security issue, and every step runs directly into California.

Now stand on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles and ask what any of that has to do with a tent on the corner.

Everything.

The person inside that tent is very often the last customer in a supply chain that began in a Chinese chemical plant and passed through a designated terrorist organization. 

Sacramento’s response has been to build housing around that person, hand out naloxone, and hope the addiction burns itself out. It does not, because the supply does not stop, because Sacramento is not fighting the supply. Washington is.

Two sets of numbers came out this month that make the case.

Fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S. fell 22 percent in a single year, from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025, according to the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intellignce (ODNI). LA County overdose deaths dropped from a peak of 3,220 in 2022 to 2,298 in 2025. The ODNI directly credited “disruptions to the production supply chain.”

California’s homelessness problem is going the other direction. The city of LA is up 3.4 percent. Unsheltered homelessness — people living on the streets or in cars — is up 7.9 percent.

Federal enforcement is pulling down the death rate. California housing policy is not pulling down the tent count. If Sacramento’s theory of the case were right, both numbers would be moving together. They are not.

Sacramento is treating a foreign attack as a social service problem. The Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles together handle roughly 40 percent of the containerized freight entering the U.S. The I-5 corridor carries northbound traffic from Tijuana to Portland. Every port container that is waved customer through is potentially part of a supply line that ends in a tent on Alvarado Street.

Every unhoused Californian is somebody’s child. Many are veterans. Many are victims of untreated mental illness. Many are victims of an addiction that a foreign adversary put in a Mexican cartel’s hands and shipped up to their neighborhood. 

All of that can be true at once. What cannot be true at once is that you fix this crisis without fighting the supply chain.

Homelessness is a housing story. It is a mental health story. It is a poverty story. And it is a national security story too.

You cannot solve any of them without solving all of them.

Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.