On May 19, city workers and police officers arrived at a homeless encampment near Stranahan Park in downtown Fort Lauderdale with front-end loaders, dumpsters, and blue bins. Homeless individuals who were present were given only a few minutes to put personal belongings into blue bins, to be claimed off-site at a later date. City workers then loaded all personal belongings that weren’t in the blue bins into dumpsters and destroyed them. The city also threw away personal belongings of homeless individuals who were either not present at the time of the raid or those who were not able to load what they had into bins in the short time the city gave them.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida and Southern Legal Counsel (SLC) filed a lawsuit on behalf of 16 people whose personal property was destroyed when during this raid.