The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters in Washington, D.C. The agency wants to ban families with any undocumented member from federally subsidized housing.
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Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to ban families with any member who is undocumented from living in federally subsidized housing. A proposed rule also would require local housing authorities to report any tenant not eligible for rental aid to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
It’s part of a broader Trump administration crackdown on immigration, and in an opinion column in the Washington Post Thursday HUD Secretary Scott Turner called for “ending the era of illegal aliens and other ineligible noncitizens exploiting public housing resources.”
Undocumented immigrants do not get federal rental aid, but they can live with family members who do, including many U.S.-born children. In his column, Turner said roughly 24,000 such residents in are in HUD-subsidized housing. He and some other conservatives argue that is unfair, given limited funding and long waitlists for HUD housing.
Most non-citizens with permanent legal status are eligible for housing aid. If the rule becomes law, housing authorities in large cities with lots of immigrants, like New York and Los Angeles, would see the biggest impact.
“Trump’s proposal runs contrary to federal law and is designed to instill fear and hardship on immigrant families,” Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, said in a statement. “His administration deflects blame for the housing crisis onto immigrants so they can continue dismantling HUD’s hallmark and lifesaving housing programs.”
HUD proposed a similar rule change late in Trump’s first term, to heated opposition from immigrant and housing advocates. It was not finalized before the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the Trump administration’s focus, and the Biden administration rescinded it.
If the new proposal were enacted, a recent analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates nearly 80,000 people would face eviction, including nearly 37,000 U.S. citizen children.
Tens of thousands of U.S. citizen children could face eviction or family separation
Over the past year, Turner has repeatedly suggested that undocumented immigrants are taking advantage of public housing benefits and cheating Americans. The headline of the agency’s news release announcing the proposed rule said, “Illegals, Ineligibles and Fraudsters, Pack Your Bags,” with emojis of a waving hand, a purse and a plane.
Local housing agencies say they are following longstanding, bipartisan policy.
“Public housing authorities are faithful stewards of taxpayer dollars,” La Shelle Dozier, CEO of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities, said in a statement to NPR. She added that they are committed to ensuring access to housing for “America’s most vulnerable families.”
Such a change would leave families who’ve been in the U.S. for decades facing tough choices.
“We were really planning on staying here,” said one woman who lives in public housing in Los Angeles but asked that her name not be used for fear of being targeted for deportation. “Our family is our kids, and this is where they grew up.”
She and her husband came to the U.S. from Mexico nearly three decades ago. She cleans houses, her husband is a butcher, and she says they’ve been in the process of trying to legalize their immigration status. One son came with them when he was young, and that allowed him certain rights under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected such people from deportation. But the Trump administration has been rolling those back, recently urging “Dreamers” to self-deport.
The woman said they’ve talked with their children about the possibility of being separated or having to move to her home country.
“They’ve seen photos and videos and have spoken with family, but they don’t really know anything about Mexico,” she said. She’s also not sure family members there would be able to house them.
She worries most for her younger kids, who are still teenagers and would not be able to stay on their own in the U.S.
“They might not have a place to call home and to come back to,” she said.
Conservatives say federal aid is so limited that housing people here illegally is wrong
The Republican policy guide Project 2025 put out by the Heritage Foundation called for the mixed-status rule, stating that “HUD’s statutory obligations include providing housing for American citizens who are in need.” It suggested local governments or nonprofits could help noncitizens.
Some conservatives argue it’s not fair to house people who entered the country illegally, especially when federal rental assistance already falls far short of need. Only about 1 in 4 Americans who qualify for such aid are actually able to get it, and waitlists are often years-long.
“It makes sense to change the policy for potential new tenants — both to be fair to those on waiting lists and to limit a financial incentive for illegal immigration,” Howard Husock of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in the New York Post last year.
But he added that it’s not practical to evict non-citizens currently living in subsidized housing, “who were party to legal leases signed with public agencies. ICE agents have enough to do without raiding the projects.”
The change would be costly since mixed-status families pay more
Immigrant and housing advocates point out that because undocumented tenants get no subsidy, mixed-status families pay significantly higher rent and effectively subsidize others.
“The net result is to make more housing available for everyone, including people who are on the waiting list,” says Marie Claire Tran-Leung with the National Housing Law Project, a housing law and advocacy center.
She also worries that evicting mixed-status families would worsen poverty and homelessness at a time when local governments already struggle with a record-high number of people living outside or in shelters.
Another public housing resident in LA, who also did not want her name used for fear of deportation, says it would be devastating if her family could not stay where they are. She’s Mexican, her husband is Guatemalan, and all four of their children were born in the U.S.
“The government doesn’t want people living on the streets, but we won’t have any other option,” she said.
They applied for rental aid after the bathroom ceiling in their former apartment caved in, she said. Two children have health issues that keep her from working full time. Her husband is a day laborer, a job that’s become more precarious since Immigrations and Customs Enforcement stepped up raids and arrests in Los Angeles.
“We have to focus on saving so that we can take care of our kids,” she said.
Starting Friday, the HUD proposal will be open for public comment for 60 days. The agency is required to take comments into account before issuing a final version of the rule. In Trump’s first term, Tran-Leung says 30,000 comments were overwhelmingly against the measure, which could factor into a potential legal challenge.
