Trump turns housing agency into another weapon in his immigration crackdown
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has dramatically expanded its immigration enforcement activities, auditing thousands of housing applicants and proposing new rules that would force mixed-status families to choose between separating from undocumented relatives or losing rental assistance entirely.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner has instructed public housing authorities to verify immigration status for approximately 200,000 people receiving federal housing benefits, reported the Washington Post. The department is also sharing data with the Department of Homeland Security and has proposed a rule blocking mixed-status households — families containing both documented and undocumented members — from accessing housing programs altogether.
The policy would devastate eligible families. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that nearly 80,000 people would lose housing assistance under the proposed rule, including 52,600 eligible citizens and 35,400 citizen children. Housing officials report that for every ineligible person removed from programs, approximately three eligible people lose assistance.
Public housing authorities have raised significant concerns about the implementation. HUD provided 3,000 housing agencies with lists of flagged tenants and demanded corrections within 30 days — a timeframe housing officials characterize as impossible. After investigation, local officials discovered the vast majority of flagged individuals were flagged in error due to data synchronization problems, duplicate entries, or administrative mistakes like missing initials or transposed Social Security numbers.
Mark Thiele, chief executive of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, criticized the shift in mission.
“Putting that responsibility on them shifts immigration enforcement away from the agencies that are meant to handle it and actually puts eligible families at risk of losing their housing assistance,” Thiele said. “Housing agencies should focus on what they do best: providing homes for their communities. They should not be asked to act as immigration enforcers on top of that.”
Turner defended the policy as necessary to protect taxpayer funds and ensure benefits reach U.S. citizens. "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," he stated.
Housing experts argue the policy won't address underlying housing shortages or lower costs. Of 4.4 million HUD-assisted households, only approximately 20,000 are mixed-status. The proposed changes represent part of a broader administration effort to use federal agencies for immigration enforcement, including similar initiatives at the Education Department, IRS, and banking sector.
Trump may have accidentally torpedoed his own bid to seize voter rolls: analyst
President Donald Trump's executive order demanding states put new procedures in place for mail-in voting and turn over information about who is voting by mail is almost certain to be struck down in court, Jim Saksa wrote for Democracy Docket on Friday — but that's not the only way it could derail Trump's ambitions.
That's because this order could also undermine one of the main arguments Trump's Justice Department has used in court to defend the lawsuits filed against dozens of states to seize their voting rolls.
"In those lawsuits, the DOJ has claimed it needs millions of voters’ private sensitive data in order to ensure the states are complying with federal laws that require states to take steps to ensure accurate rolls," said the report. "But outside of court, DOJ officials like Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon have undermined that claim by boasting that the state voter records they’ve already obtained have been used to verify citizenship status using the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program."
After judges began ruling against the lawsuits on these grounds, DOJ officials backpedaled somewhat and said there was no plan to help the Department of Homeland Security build a national database of voters.
Trump, however, may have blown that excuse by outright acknowledging in his executive order that he "directs DHS to create a nationwide voter registration database," noted the report.
"Along with Dhillon’s statements and Trump’s orders, the DOJ’s courtroom attestations have been impeached repeatedly," wrote Saksa. For example, "last week, CBS reported that DOJ and DHS were working to formalize a data-sharing agreement for the voter rolls. And on the same day Tucker was assuring a federal judge that the DOJ wouldn’t share state records with DHS, Eric Neff, acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Rights Section, admitted to another judge in Rhode Island that they, in fact, would."
Trump's lawsuits for state voting data are not just limited to Democratic-controlled states, but even some Republican-controlled states where GOP election officials have concluded sharing the data would be illegal. Some of these lawsuits have run into legal blunders, including the revelation that there was no proof the suit against Washington State was properly served.
