Michele Okoh, assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, discusses how Americans displaced by extreme weather calamities are penalized by an inadequate support system at UHLC’s Environment, Energy, and Natural Resource (EENR) Center webinar “Criminalizing Climate Displacement.”
June 24, 2025 ‒Despite decades of catastrophic storms and wildfires, the United States continues to treat many displaced disaster survivors as criminals rather than victims, according to Professor Michele Okoh, the featured speaker at a recent University of Houston Law Center webinar.
Okoh, an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon, presented her scholarship at the “Criminalizing Climate Displacement” webinar hosted by UHLC’s Environment, Energy and Natural Resources (EENR) Center. She is authoring a paper on climate displacement – mass human relocation due to climate issues – and how current laws are negatively impacting those made homeless and/or jobless.
Citing a range of disasters from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the Camp Fire in 2018 and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, Okoh shared that displaced individuals often face vagrancy charges and other punitive measures while struggling to rebuild their lives.
She pointed to Chico, California, which absorbed many residents displaced by the Camp Fire. Seven years later, the city’s resources remain stretched.
“In the beginning periods of this displacement, we saw news reports that were really sympathizing with those individuals who were displaced due to the wildfires,” Okoh said. “But as time went on what we saw is that sympathy beginning to wane and the characterization of this population shifting from seeing them as victims to essentially looking at them more as criminals. They became unwelcomed guests.”
Okoh emphasized that current federal programs, including FEMA, are not designed to handle the long-term realities of mass displacement. “The Government Accountability Office highlighted that our federal programs are not designed to address the complexity of community relocation,” she said. “Our response currently is mainly reactionary, as opposed to preemptive, where we could be planning in advance.”
She recalled how Katrina survivors were subjected to strict shelter controls and forced relocation under military oversight.
Without a federal strategy to manage mass displacement, Okoh warned, future disaster survivors will face the same fate. “The problems we saw during Katrina have not been resolved,” she said.
The event was co-moderated by Qaraman Hasan, an EENR research scholar who teaches international environmental law, and UHLC Professor Tracy Hester, co-director of the EENR Center.
For more information about the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Center, visit https://www.law.uh.edu/eenrcenter/
