The Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing a new rule that risks thrusting thousands of people into homelessness, all in the service of Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crusade.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Thursday proposed the rule, which would prevent households that include an undocumented immigrant from accessing federal housing benefits, and would require local housing officials to turn over any information they have on undocumented immigrants.
As NPR reported:
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.’
Turner, who rattled off unsourced claims to Congress about the number of immigrants using social services, wrote in his Post column that his department believes around 24,000 undocumented immigrants live in homes in which the primary operator is receiving housing assistance. As NPR notes, undocumented immigrants are already barred from receiving federal rental assistance themselves, so the “exploitation” Turner wants to target is apparently the mere presence of an undocumented immigrant in a federally subsidized household — even if the person overseeing the home is a U.S. citizen.
How an undocumented immigrant having a roof over their head in a mixed-status household constitutes a fraud against the American taxpayer is likely a mystery to those who aren’t blinded by racism and xenophobia.
For years now, Republicans have peddled misleading claims about immigrants who are purportedly straining U.S. housing markets. Vice President JD Vance, in particular, has been debunked on multiple occasions after pushing such propaganda. To the contrary, numerous executives in the housing industry have told the administration that its war on immigration is actually undermining efforts to build new homes for Americans to live in. These efforts are moving in parallel with administration policies that give the public no reason to trust its determinations about who is or isn’t a lawful resident of the United States, as it has pushed to end birthright citizenship, has deported U.S. citizens (while the president fantasizes about having them imprisoned abroad) and looks to strip citizenship from immigrants who have obtained it. It’s apparently much easier for Republicans to stoke bigoted fears about housing shortage rather than do anything substantive to fix the problem. Turner for his part has turned his department into a vessel to platform far-right extremists, such as Christian nationalist influencer Sean Feucht, and the secretary’s latest proposal is yet more evidence that the administration’s war on immigrants is rooted in brazen bigotry rather than logic or patriotism.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
