For those on the streets — who have lost their jobs, have suffered from drug addiction, mental illness or disabilities — crackdowns on homeless camps are seen as tantamount to punishing people for being poor.

Activists and homeless residents like Mr. Russell are waging public campaigns and court fights against local laws that ban “urban camping” — prohibitions that activists say are aimed at the homeless. The right to rest, they say, should be a new civil right for the homeless. Many wear buttons that ask, “Move Along to Where?” and are challenging misdemeanor citations and anti-camping ordinances, like Denver’s, in court.

“They take away your means of survival,” said Jerry Burton, who was ticketed the same day as Mr. Russell.

In recent years, the Obama administration has offered the homeless and their advocates some support. In a 2015 statement of interest addressing a law in Boise, Idaho, the Justice Department warned that local laws criminalizing homelessness could violate the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development has said it takes into consideration policies that criminalize homelessness when deciding which places should get competitive grants.

Advocates for the homeless said those policies had strengthened their hand. They are now worried about how those measures — and broader funding for homeless services — might fare under President-elect Donald J. Trump, who ran as a “law and order candidate.”

Image A group of homeless people making coffee at their camp outside Denver last week. Many homeless people in the area take shelter just beyond city limits to avoid the police. Credit... Nick Cote for The New York Times

“We’re quite concerned,” said Maria Foscarinis, the founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which estimated that half of American cities had some kind of anti-camping law.

“No sooner do you win the battle than 10 other cities pop up criminalizing homelessness,” Ms. Foscarinis added. “The idea was if you could get the federal government on your side, you have a much broader impact.”

Nationwide, the number of homeless people is declining, according to the most recent counts. But camps have become a particularly acute problem in the West, where soaring housing costs and a scarcity of subsidized apartments have pushed homelessness to the fore in booming towns like Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver and San Francisco.

As new clusters of tents and sleeping bags pop up along river banks, on city sidewalks and in parks and gentrifying neighborhoods, they are exposing deep divisions about how cities should strike a balance between accommodation and enforcement.

In Seattle, where violence has flared in a homeless camp known as the Jungle, beneath a freeway, there was a fierce response to a councilman’s proposal to allow the city’s 3,000 unsheltered homeless residents to camp in some parks and on undeveloped public land.