HUD Plans To Force Families With Mixed Immigration Status Off Housing Aid
The White House is planning to change the rules around housing assistance to exclude households with mixed immigration status.
The proposed rule change from President Donald Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development would require everyone in a household receiving federal assistance to prove their residency status, a shift that housing advocates say would lead to tens of thousands of evictions.
“Trump is trying to evict immigrant families, citizen and non-citizen, from HUD housing,” the National Housing Law Project, a tenant advocacy group, said in a statement. “Trump’s proposal runs contrary to federal law and is designed to instill fear and hardship on immigrant families.”
The proposed change to regulations, set to be published for public comment in the Federal Register on Friday, would change how HUD verifies the eligibility status of every member of a household receiving federal assistance and expand the citizenship review process.
The proposed rule would make aid available only to households that can prove everyone living there, regardless of age, is a U.S. citizen, U.S. national or noncitizen with legal immigration status.
HUD acknowledged in its proposal that the change will lead to the eviction of mixed-status households, but it said the vacancies will be filled by fully eligible families.
“The most significant effect of this rulemaking would be to transfer assistance from mixed status families to fully eligible households. However, HUD believes that this cost is adequately offset by the reallocation of HUD funds to the intended recipients,” the proposed rule change says.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the days of illegal aliens, ineligibles, and fraudsters gaming the system and riding the coattails of American taxpayers are over,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement Thursday. “HUD’s proposed rule will guarantee that all residents in HUD-funded housing are eligible tenants. We have zero tolerance for pushing aside hardworking U.S. citizens while enabling others to exploit decades-old loopholes.”
Once published, the proposed rule is subject to a 60-day public comment period that could lead to changes before it is put into force. Once enacted, households with mixed immigration status would have 90 days to prove the eligibility of every individual living there.
NHLP forecasts that the change in rules will lead to more than 100,000 people, including 37,000 children, being evicted. The proposal, in the works since at least August, revives a similar attempt during the first Trump administration to strip housing assistance from mixed-status households.
Under Turner, HUD has become one of the lead agencies executing Trump’s promised agenda. The agency surprised landlords and housing authorities last month with an order that gave them 30 days to prove the citizenship and eligibility status of more than 200,000 renters receiving federal assistance, a month after it published a report pointing to illegal immigration and declining marriage rates as causes of America’s housing crisis.
The agency laid off hundreds of workers as part of the White House’s push to cut the federal bureaucracy, and payment delays during last year’s government shutdown created havoc for affordable housing landlords.
HUD is also planning an overhaul of the federal government’s homeless intervention policy to direct funding away from housing assistance and toward mental health and addiction treatment.
The updated rules come as the Trump administration continues a broadscale crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, targeting 3,000 daily arrests. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in late January that the administration had deported more than 675,000 people and that another 2.2 million people “self-deported.”
Those numbers are disputed, with researchers from UCLA tallying 350,000 deportations since Jan. 20, 2025.
