This story is published in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.
For one California mother, public housing has been a lifeline for her household of five—her two young adult daughters, husband, and young nephew. She could not afford rent without the federally subsidized housing that they all share.
It’s also a lifeline for another reason: She doesn’t feel comfortable leaving the safe haven of her home amid increased immigration enforcement. An undocumented immigrant herself, she fears she could be targeted by federal agents any time she leaves to work or shop. Her family is known as “mixed-status” by the government—some people in her household are documented, but others are not. Now, a proposed rule by the Trump administration would end eligibility for mixed-status families such as hers.
Even as she acknowledges that she does not feel threatened in her home, like many of her neighbors, she worries about losing federal housing aid. She’s worked hard since she came to the United States in 1989, she said, but without a stable income, she hasn’t been able to cover the full month’s rent—she contributes 30 percent to the total—without help. Though now, since she relies on subsidies, she is far less comfortable engaging with public housing employees. Given her family’s status, she worries that they’ll share her information with immigration enforcement officers.
“I don’t feel as confident as I did before,” she said in her native Spanish during an interview with a translator. “They tell you they’re not going to share it, and then it turns out they did share the information. The employees are lying.” She asked that her name not be used because of concerns about being evicted or deported.
As the law now stands, any assistance received by these families is prorated based on how many family members are eligible. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Trump is seeking to end this policy, re-upping a rule that he had proposed in 2019 during his first administration. The policy is currently under review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, but if enacted, it would require that all members of a household must be eligible for housing assistance, or the entire household would be disqualified.
On March 24, 2025, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem signed a “memorandum of understanding”—a nonbinding agreement between the two agencies—promising to “end the wasteful misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to benefit illegal aliens instead of American citizens.” In short, Turner and Noem’s agreement aims to exclude undocumented residents and non-citizens from accessing any federal housing programs, including public housing and housing choice vouchers.
In an email response from Homeland Security, Noem wrote, “If you are an illegal immigrant, you should leave now.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development did not respond to a request for comment.
“What differentiates then from now is the very aggressive and lawless nature of their deportation and general anti-immigrant agenda,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, evictions initiative project director at the National Housing Law Project. She added that all families are being forced to calculate their risks—whether they live in subsidized housing or not.
In 2019, the Congressional Research Service estimated that Trump’s proposed “rule would likely result in the displacement from HUD-assisted housing of over 25,000 families, including 55,000 children.” CRS noted that in total, around 110,000 people would have been affected by the rule change, but the Biden administration rescinded the policy in 2021 before it went into effect. While a similar estimate on this rule does not exist for 2025, the Center for Migration Studies estimates that there are around 4.7 million mixed-status households in America.
In commenting about the situation, Noem wrote in the email, “The Biden Administration prioritized illegal aliens over our own citizens, including by giving illegal aliens taxpayer-funded housing at the expense of Americans. Not anymore. The entire government will work together to identify abuse and exploitation of public benefits and make sure those in this country illegally are not receiving federal benefits or other financial incentives to stay illegally.”
This year’s version of the rule has yet to go into effect, but the potential change is forcing some families to preemptively relocate.
“We’re trying to spread the message that the administration is going to say all sorts of things that are untrue, but you still have the right to stay where you are.”
“We’re trying to spread the message that the administration is going to say all sorts of things that are untrue, but you still have the right to stay where you are,” Tran-Leung said. “You don’t have to move.” She added that preemptive moves also occurred in 2019 when the rule was first proposed.
As of May this year, more than 2.3 million units nationwide were leased using housing choice vouchers, and by mid-August nearly 790,000 public housing units were being leased across the country. That means millions of Americans rely on federal rental or housing assistance.
Already, non-citizens are largely excluded from accessing any of these programs and are only eligible for federal housing vouchers if they are in the United States with specific designations, if they are refugees, for instance, or have parole status, which is a temporary status provided for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” according to HUD guidelines.
Although these changes do not substantially alter existing laws, immigration advocates, fair housing nonprofit leaders, and housing lawyers with whom I spoke say that the most significant impact is likely to be the chilling effect not only for undocumented or non-citizen residents, but also for those who are legally eligible for federal rental assistance.
“What we’re seeing is people are terrified, and it’s deliberate,” said Nicole Smith, communications manager at the Protecting Immigrant Families Coalition, a national group of organizations advocating for immigrants’ rights. “Now that we’ve got this data sharing happening between service providers and the federal government, people are just terrified to access anything.”
This pervasive reluctance to engage with federal housing resources also includes not reporting incidents of housing discrimination or violations of fair housing law, according to multiple advocates at fair housing enforcement and education nonprofits.
“Because these individuals have now been put in such a state of fear, if you’re an undocumented individual, putting your name in any federal system is the last thing on your mind,” said a leader at one Rocky Mountains nonprofit. “You’re going to accept the little conditions that are presented to you until you find something better—if you find something better,” he added, asking that his name not be used because of concern about future retaliation against his organization. “So these people are now going to be living in inappropriate conditions, in illegal circumstances.”
Advocates with several nonprofits tasked with assisting in fair housing enforcement noted that they did not have any specific cases related to immigration-based discrimination—not because there was no such discrimination, but because, as Michael Chavarria, executive director of the HOPE Fair Housing Center in Illinois, wrote in an email, “of the fear and anxiety that exists at this time. I do not think anyone feels safe reporting the housing discrimination they experience, even if it is a violation of their federal or state civil rights.”
“I do not think anyone feels safe reporting the housing discrimination they experience, even if it is a violation of their federal or state civil rights.”
That distrust even extends to nonprofits themselves.
Carole Conn, executive director of Project Sentinel, a fair housing organization in Santa Clara, California, reminds everyone she works with that the data they collect is protected and should not be shared outside of their organization. They also won’t ask for someone’s immigration status. But even in a state with legal protections against landlords threatening immigration enforcement against tenants, she still sees distrust among people seeking help. Once more, the recurring theme, she said, “is the fear, unquestionably and justifiably.”
“Some of this is just rooted in the fact that not only are they fearful of anything that has a whiff of government,” Conn added. But that includes people who work in her organization. It was like, “ ‘How can I trust you, you’re taking vital information from me?’ ”
Some of these nonprofits lost funding earlier this year amid grant cancellations for the Fair Housing Initiatives Program. A significant proportion of those cuts were meant to educate residents on their rights as tenants and how they could determine what constituted housing discrimination, regardless of their legal status.
And this chilling effect goes beyond immigrants or those who are undocumented. Tenants from Latino or Hispanic backgrounds, even if they are American citizens, are significantly more likely to face threats of immigration action. Smith said she believes that the fear associated with immigration enforcement is intentionally targeted to harm these communities.
“It is to intimidate the largest immigrant groups in this country. It’s full racism. It’s shameless racism,” she said. “There is no way to deny, and it’s absolutely deliberate.”
The impacts of Trump’s rhetoric remain to be seen. Only eight months after his inauguration, data on housing discrimination claims regarding immigration status or national origin are not yet available. Advocates from across the country, however, said that anecdotally, they have seen the number of fair housing concerns about immigration enforcement increase.
“With the direction that the administration is taking, I think we’ve seen, even since January, a lot more instances of targeted discrimination where maybe we hadn’t seen before,” said Courtney Arthur, the program manager for Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid’s Housing Discrimination Law Project, a fair housing nonprofit. She said landlords have started to call ICE to report people whom they think may be undocumented.
A December 2024 study by the Urban Institute found that, even before Trump’s inauguration, 29 percent of adults in all immigrant families and 60 percent in mixed-status families worried “a lot” or “some” about participating in essential activities, such as going to work, sending children to school, and driving a car.
“So many people who are afraid of ICE enforcement, at work or at schools, are staying at home as a refuge,” Tran-Leung said.
But if federal assistance to that housing is in jeopardy, so is that refuge—especially if there is additional discriminatory behavior coming from the landlords themselves.
“They might be subject to harassment by their landlord, or subject to weaponized threats to call ICE on them,” Tran-Leung added. “It has made a lot of immigrant families just far less likely to access the resources that are legally available to them because a lot of folks live in fear of being entrapped.”
Some of the fear around engaging with federal housing resources comes from a concern about data-sharing practices. Multiple federal laws, the Privacy Act of 1974, for example, of the more recent Federal Information Security Modernization Act and E-Government Act, allow agencies to maintain records that are relevant and necessary to their agency work. But under Trump, agencies have regularly shared what was once privileged and sensitive personal information.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center and Democracy Forward organizations filed a lawsuit against the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in February for “its illegal seizure of personnel records and payment system data” in the Department of the Treasury and Office of Personnel Management databases. And later that month, ProPublica reported that DOGE gained access to the HUD Enforcement Management System, which contains confidential information about those who have reported housing discrimination claims—a database consisting of hundreds of thousands of people. Though a HUD spokesperson told ProPublica after publication that, in fact, DOGE did not have access to that system, just the possibility that information could be shared was sufficient to dissuade someone from reporting discrimination.
This has all resulted in a climate where the fear of losing one’s housing or having personal information used against them by immigration enforcement is omnipresent for many people, even those with legal residency status.
“There is no word that captures the cruelty of putting families in such precarious, isolated, and unsafe situations,” Chavarria wrote.
