Albuquerque grassroots street outreach for homeless followed by city encampment sweep

Shielded from the sun beneath a canopy tent, Kim Damon slouched in a folding chair on Vermont SE. Her hairdresser, whom she had met for the first time moments earlier, had set up the impromptu salon on the asphalt.

While a haircut is a routine order for some, for Damon, who has spent the past five months sleeping, eating and living on the streets — it was a luxury.

“Do you feel beautiful?” Marisol Flores asked Damon after she finished blow-drying her hair. Damon hesitated. Then quietly answered, “yes.”

After getting a better look at herself in the mirror, Damon combed her fingers through her long brown hair, straightened her back and threw up two peace signs.

“I feel so much healthier, so much lighter,” Damon said gleefully. The 48-year-old said it’d been “a minute” since she felt good in her own skin.

From sideswept bangs to mohawks, longtime cosmetologists and friends Flores and Kelly Shea cut hair for the unhoused off East Central in exchange for help cleaning up the block, which had been littered with Styrofoam cups, abandoned shoes and other debris.

From afar, it might’ve looked and sounded like a block party, with rap music blasting through a speaker on the roof of a fluorescent yellow firetruck, a hot dog stand, and people milling about with smiles on their faces.

In reality, it was a collective of roofers, hairdressers and addiction clinic employees who took to the streets of Albuquerque’s International District to provide basic services for their unsheltered neighbors — services like showers, food and, as they put it, dignity.

“This is giving them a chance to be a part of something again,” said Dante Padilla, the founder of Unconditional Love Foundation. “Taste it, feel it, come back. Wake up. You’re not gone yet.”

Following the collective cleanup effort, the next day city sanitation workers escorted by Albuquerque Police Department officers did an encampment sweep, emptying the street and throwing at least one woman’s personal belongings into a trash compactor as she watched. The city of Albuquerque is currently tied up in a legal battle over the enforcement of public camping laws against the unhoused that recently made its way to the state Supreme Court. On the other side of the fight, attorneys representing several individuals who are involuntarily homeless say the city’s sweeps violate their client’s civil rights.

Many volunteers with Unconditional Love Foundation expressed frustration with government bureaucracy getting in the way of helping those in need and saw their street outreach as a solution.

“The issue is what the government is not doing — so we had to step up,” said volunteer Christian Maes.

Hairdresser Shea used to cut hair for kids in New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department custody, but grew tired of the “politics” and inefficiency of the agency, she said. Now she’s happy to help the Unconditional Love Foundation do the work in the streets.

The initiative to wash the hands and feet of his neighbors, most of whom are homeless, started about a month ago, with just two volunteers, said founder Padilla. Tuesday afternoon, there were easily a dozen people from all walks of life passing out shovels and rakes, operating showers and serving up ice water and doughnuts.

Their approach is unique, volunteer Carlos Zuniga said, because it’s “for the streets by the streets.”

Zuniga grew up rough. He dropped out of high school, spent time in jail, and struggled with mental illness and drug abuse, which is all too often ignored in his community, he said.

“Most of us in Hispanic culture in New Mexico, we don’t know what mental health is, what’s bipolar, we don’t know the different stages of mental health and we don’t talk about it,” Zuniga said. “‘Get over it. Suck it up. Cowboy up. Sweep it under the carpet. Get a new girlfriend,’ but you just Band-Aid the emotion. And then you get frustrated. You don’t understand what you’re going through. And the first thought for an addict is to self-medicate.”

Having recovered from addiction, Zuniga said it’s easier to build trust and get people into treatment when they feel they’re not being judged.

Staff from Harmony Horizons, a treatment center for substance use and mental health, and Crossroads Treatment Center, an inpatient rehab, were on site Tuesday to offer resources. Several people that day stopped the workers to ask questions about treatment.

The sweep

The next day the street that was filled with people was a ghost town. A city encampment sweep cleared the area, according to neighbors and people on the street.

The city’s Solid Waste Department confirmed that both their workers and APD were there Wednesday.

Teresa Gonzales, who has been homeless for six months, said she could only watch as her belongings — which included a purse with her ID and cash, a crate of high heels and all her clothes — were thrown into the back of a garbage truck and crushed.

It’s city policy to give two hours notice before an encampment sweep to allow people to move their belongings, unless it is “apparent that the individual within the encampment is able to vacate the site in a shorter amount of time,” according to the policy.

It is also city policy to first offer temporary storage of personal belongings prior to removal. Solid Waste Department spokesperson Alex Bukoski said that Gonzales declined services from the city that morning.

“Items left behind after a person declines storage and housing options are considered abandoned and disposed of properly,” Bukoski said in a statement.

Gonzales, who lives out of a truck with her boyfriend, said she was crossing the street several yards away to move her bike when her belongings were thrown, without warning.

In a video captured by onlooking neighbor Alessandra Barajas during the encampment sweep, an APD officer can be overheard saying, “We (expletive) threw everything away,” while other officers laugh along.

“To serve and protect who? They certainly aren’t protecting the people they should be,” Gonzales said.

Gonzales took a drag of her cigarette, her hands trembling. She only had $30 to her name, and now it was gone. Without her ID, she won’t have the documents necessary for a housing voucher application.

“Knocking you down is all they’re doing,” Gonzales said. “And kicking you while you’re down so you can stay down, too.”

Unconditional Love Foundation showers hope