Trump Admin Prepares to Kick Mixed Immigration Status Families Out of Public Housing

The Intercept

16 hours ago

President Donald Trump appears to be quietly reviving a plan from his first term that would kick families of mixed immigration status out of public housing and prohibit them from receiving most forms of rental assistance, escalating his administration's attacks on access to public services for immigrant communities.
Last Wednesday, the Trump administration posted a proposed rule for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA. While details were scant on the website, the language mirrors an abandoned 2019 proposal that would have increased documentation requirements for federal housing assistance — and likely forced tens of thousands of mixed-status families to choose between homelessness, financial ruin, or family separation.
Undocumented people are currently ineligible for most federally-funded rental assistance programs, but in families where some people have legal status, members who qualify can receive pro-rated housing assistance, allowing the whole family to live together in public housing. Under the proposed 2019 rule, those families would become ineligible for most federally-funded housing assistance programs if at least one member of the family is disqualified by their immigration status.
Housing and immigration experts told The Intercept that the new proposal looks like a revival of that attempted rule.
'The choice that families will be faced with,' said Anna Bailey, a Senior Analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 'is going to be staying together, but losing the assistance that makes housing affordable, putting them at risk of eviction and instability and homelessness or splitting up… that's a really agonizing decision.'
The Washington Post reported in April that the Trump administration was drafting a rule to exclude mixed-status families from public housing, which they'd previously attempted to implement in 2019.
Now, experts believe the administration may have taken the first step in enacting that policy by posting the proposed rule to OIRA — a subset of the Office of Management and Budget that has to review the rule before it can go to HUD.
HUD did not return The Intercept's requests for comment by the time of publication.
'[The 2019 rule] was met with overwhelming opposition,' explained Marie Claire Tran-Leung, Evictions Initiative Project Director and a Senior Staff Attorney at the National Housing Law Project. 'There were 30,000 comments, which was the record at the time.'
The first Trump administration ran out of time to finalize the rule, Tran-Leung said, and the Biden administration withdrew it.
Though undocumented people can't access housing assistance programs themselves, the current rules allow them to benefit from limited financial assistance and increased housing stability for their families. A family with one undocumented parent and two U.S. citizen children, for example, would receive pro-rated assistance based on the two children. A family with one undocumented parent, one U.S. citizen parent, and two U.S. citizen children would receive assistance based on the three citizens in the family.
Analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities based on the 2019 version of the rule found that the primary victims of this policy would be children, who made up over half of the population in public housing living in mixed-status households. According to their findings, roughly 58,200 children could lose housing as a result of the policy change — an estimated 56,000 of those children are U.S. citizens.
Latino families would also be disproportionately impacted by the rule change. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report, roughly 85 percent of mixed-status families living in public housing were Latino. The analysis found that, on average, these families typically earned around $13,000 a year.
'These are families who also very much need this to stay stably housed,' said Sonya Acosta, Senior Policy Analyst with the Housing and Income Security team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 'Losing this will automatically destabilize them.'
Esther Reyes, a Campaign Strategist for the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition, said this change would have a 'profound' impact on children in mixed-status families.
'The impact is going to be not just widespread, but very profound. Stable housing is a really important determinant of a child's well-being,' she said. 'It's one of the foundational sources of stability that children need to be able to meet their other needs and milestones.'
Research has consistently shown links between housing instability and a host of adverse outcomes for children — including mental health effects like depression and anxiety, and dangers to physical health, including increased emergency room visits.
Acosta and Bailey noted that this time around, they expect a similar rule change could affect fewer families — because the Trump administration has effectively scared many mixed-status families out of accessing public benefits.
In addition to prohibiting mixed-status families from living in public housing, the original rule also included new documentation requirements to check citizenship status. Experts predict the change would not only be difficult for many low-income families to obtain, but could also scare immigrants from applying for assistance in the first place.
'Already, a lot of families with immigrants are afraid of applying for assistance that they actually are eligible for,' said Bailey. The change could intensify that fear, she said, so 'even folks who are absolutely eligible for assistance may not apply and seek help that they need to have housing stability.'
'It doesn't matter if you're an immigrant or how long you've been in this country; everybody needs a safe, stable place to live.'
Experts also expressed concern that the spread of fear and misinformation around the potential rule change could drive families out of their homes prematurely.
'The danger is that families make the calculus that they have to leave the housing that they currently have,' said Tran-Leung at The National Housing Law Project. 'We are trying to really prevent that, because until this final rule is passed, the law hasn't changed, and they have the right to stay there.'
For now, the rule change is only in its initial stages. The administration still needs to post the proposed rule to HUD's website, along with a detailed policy proposal, and allow for public comment. Until that happens, its exact details will remain unclear.
Acosta said she expects the rule to be 'essentially the same,' as the 2019 version, especially in its goals of excluding mixed-status families from subsidized housing. 'But at this point, it's pretty unclear.'
No matter how the details turn out, the rule is another attempt to scapegoat immigrants for a housing crisis entirely within the U.S. government's power to solve, Acosta said.
'In a country as wealthy and as powerful as ours is, we actually could make sure that everyone has a safe place to live,' Acosta said. 'It doesn't matter if you're an immigrant or how long you've been in this country; everybody needs a safe, stable place to live. So part of what this kind of policy proposal is trying to do is pit the needs of some people against other.'