Democrats and housing advocates say a new data-sharing agreement between the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Homeland Security is not just inappropriate, but potentially dangerous.
“This memo turns HUD into an arm of DHS. We should not be turning housing programs into surveillance programs,” Rep. Nydia Velázquez told NOTUS this week. “That is not what these resources are for.”
The secretaries of HUD and DHS signed a memo on camera earlier this week meant to facilitate data sharing and “ensure taxpayer-funded housing programs are not used to harbor or benefit illegal aliens.” The housing agency also called for federally funded homeless shelters to restrict access to noncitizens, and instructed mortgage lenders to remove its sections on non-permanent residents entirely.
Critics of the policy say that the Trump administration using HUD for deportation efforts could also have repercussions for U.S. citizens, including children in mixed-status families.
“With information, data sharing between HUD and the Department of Homeland Security, I think they’re going to make mistakes, like they always do, and they’re going to kick a lot of especially children, citizen children out on the street,” Rep. Juan Vargas told NOTUS.
HUD did not respond to a request for comment.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a social media post this week that HUD found 24,000 “ineligible” people living in “HUD Housing.” But HUD policy already bars undocumented immigrants from receiving housing assistance.
HUD does make an exception for “mixed-status families,” where at least one member of the home is a legal U.S. resident or green card holder. In these cases, mixed-status families receive an adjusted amount of assistance, only covering the members of the household with legal status.
“The fact of the matter is that when you have ineligible members in a household, HUD doesn’t subsidize those members,” said Brook Hill, a senior counsel at Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “By getting rid of the mixed-status families, HUD actually isn’t going to save money, and it will actually decrease the number of overall households that are being served and it could result in increased homelessness in some areas.”
A 2019 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that more than 100,000 people could be affected by a HUD ban on housing assistance for mixed-status families.
It speaks “to some of the administration’s larger attacks on folks who are immigrants despite their legal status,” said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
“This is a tactic that pits the very basic need of housing of some groups against basic needs of others in a way that is really unnecessary,” added Anna Bailey, a senior policy analyst at CBPP.
Immigrant communities have been operating under a cloud of uncertainty since the beginning of Trump’s term, said Lisette Orellana Engel, an economic policy director for the Hispanic civil rights organization UnidosUS. But the rapid changes from HUD over the last month have taken place with little to no communication or clarity from the agency, she said.
“It’s all happening so fast at the moment,” Engel said. “And by design, this MOU and these actions are vague to create fear in hopes that people will potentially either self identify or, what the core of this action is, to self-deport.”
The actions taken by HUD over this month could make it harder for undocumented tenants to file complaints with their landlords out of fear of eviction based on their immigration status, said Tony Samara, a senior policy organizer with the left-leaning housing justice group Right to the City Alliance.
“The danger here has just become kind of a generalized program on the part of the federal government, to use ICE to instill fear so that tenants are less likely to complain about unsafe conditions and are less likely to complain about landlords breaking the law,” Samara said.
Some Republicans have advocated for restricting housing access for mixed-status families. During Turner’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Bernie Moreno said that undocumented immigrants were making housing less affordable.
“If you had ‘Supply and Demand for Dummies,’ you would open up page one and [it would] say, ‘Well, if you add 12 million illegals into a country in a period of time that require housing, perhaps housing prices will go up.’ And yet there is incredible denial about that fact,” Moreno said at the time.
Rep. Mike Flood, who chairs the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance, posted on social media Tuesday in support of Turner’s policies.
“Thank you to [Turner] and [DHS Secretary Kristi Noem] for your work to ensure that our country’s housing programs help the American people and don’t encourage people to break the law to come here!” Flood wrote on X.
Rep. Ralph Norman, another member of the subcommittee, said in a statement to NOTUS that Turner’s actions are a needed adjustment from the Biden administration: “The previous administration allowed not only for a fully open border policy but spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars on housing for illegal aliens.”
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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Correction: A previous version of this article misattributed a quote. It was spoken by Anna Bailey.