Rat-Infested Homeless Encampment Near White House Cleared by Park Service

The largest homeless encampment in Washington, DC, situated just blocks from the White House, was cleared out by the National Park Service on Wednesday.

“McPherson Square was closed this morning because of very serious concerns about growing threats to life, health, and safety,” said Mike Litterst, a spokesman for NPS, as UPI reported. 

“The D.C. Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services and its service providers’ request to close the encampment at McPherson Square began a deliberative, thoughtful process,” he added.

The park, which housed the largest encampment in Washington, DC, was supposed to be cleared in April, but the schedule was expedited after Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Wayne Turnage requested McPherson Square be shut down as soon as February 1, the Washington Post reported late last month. Before it was announced that the clearing would be moved up, some 70 vagrants were living in the park.

Two individuals who refused to leave the park were arrested, according to the Post.

Breitbart News paid a visit to the now-disbanded encampment in August, capturing footage of squalor with one homeless woman disposing of live rats she collected in a plastic bag. It was the second bag of rats she cobbled together that day, according to her fellow homeless resident Daniel Kingery, who said “bleeding hearts” were providing “too much of the wrong kind of help” to the homeless living there.

“You will realize what I mean by too much help, or at least too much of the wrong kind of help, if you come to this park on Saturday and Sunday,” said Kingery. “A dozen or more people, large organizations, will bring enough food, each of them will bring enough food to feed at least 100 or 200 people for the 70 or so people who are in the park”

“And when you realize that each one of these nearly a dozen or so organizations are doing the same, a lot of the resources are being wasted,” he added.

Much of the food given to the homeless population in McPherson Square was subsequently fed to birds, and the scraps the birds could not get to helped sustain a thriving rat population, according to Kingery. 

“The people I call bleeding hearts for the most part – the people that don’t care whether anybody is being helped as long as they feel good about dumping truckloads of stuff out in the park and driving off and leaving what’s left over – they need to have the glory for what little they do,” Kingery said. “So they bring their cameras out and record that they’ve given away a whole bunch of stuff. They don’t care whether one person gets the resources for three-hundred people or three-hundred people get the resources as long as they can get rid of it, pat themselves on the back, feel good, and be gone.”