New HUD Proposal Threatens Housing for Mixed Status Families
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
By Li Lovett
When Micaela was pregnant with her daughter, she and her husband applied for public housing in one of 6300 units in Los Angeles. It took 6 years to get an apartment, where the pair have since raised four children.
New rules proposed by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) now threaten to evict them from their home along with other mixed status families.
“My family’s going to be really affected by this proposal,” said Micaela, speaking in Spanish (we are only using her first name due to immigration status). All four of her kids are U.S. citizens.
“My kids, they keep reminding us this is a process; it hasn’t started yet,” she continued. “But I keep telling them, it’s not smart for us to just wait until it happens. We need to stay up to date.”
‘No options’
HUD announced the proposed rule changes in February, claiming that it aimed to “close loopholes and prohibit HUD funding” from benefiting undocumented immigrants and ineligible non citizens who “reside in taxpayer-funded housing.”
The agency provides rental assistance to millions of low-income families across its programs in public housing, and the private market with vouchers and subsidies, commonly known as Section 8.
Since the 1980s, HUD has allocated subsidies in proportion to the number of eligible recipients in a single family, including U.S. citizens and nationals, green card holders, victims of trafficking, asylees and refugees. DACA recipients, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, and undocumented immigrants are ineligible for funding even while living under the same roof.
The new rules would end funding to families like Micaela’s that share a roof with individuals in any of the above categories.
Tabatha Yelos is the organizing director at People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER) in Los Angeles. The group has been actively educating the community and organizing a letter writing campaign during the public comment period on the proposed changes, which closes April 21st.
“There are no options really for subsidized housing if the family needs to stay together,” said Yelos, noting how in cities like Los Angeles rents on the private market are unaffordable for many households.
That was the case for Micaela who has already begun looking at apartments near where her family now lives. A one-bedroom unit would cost as much as what they are currently paying for their four-bedroom unit with the subsidies.
Keeping families together
At the National Housing Law Project (NHLP), senior staff attorney Marie Claire Tran-Leung explained the choices that mixed status families like Micaela’s could face: either kick out ineligible family members, or have their subsidy terminated by the Housing Authority or private provider.
Tran-Leung, who is NHLP’s Evictions Initiative Project Director, thinks that many will decide to self evict, undermining policies enacted decades earlier to avoid precisely this outcome.
“Congress wanted to balance two priorities,” she explained. “One was to keep families together. The other was to reserve scarce housing assistance funding for those who had eligible status.”
Rob Fredericks is executive director of the City of Santa Barbara’s Housing Authority. In a recent op-ed, he took a stand for the current HUD rules.
“There is no loophole to close,” Fredericks wrote. “The current system was deliberately designed to ensure that assistance is limited to those who qualify while allowing families to remain housed together. That balance has worked for decades.”
Families of color, children most impacted
According to a December 2025 analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 86% of mixed status households living in HUD-subsidized housing are Latino. Black immigrants are the next largest group, comprising 8% of subsidized households.
California and Texas combined account for about 58% of all the families who would be affected by the rule change.
“HUD has an obligation to ensure that there aren’t disparate impacts in their policies and to abide by the Fair Housing Act,” said Sonya Acosta, senior policy analyst at the think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). “And so to propose a rule that disproportionately impacts an ethnic or racial group seems to go contrary to the Fair Housing Act.”
According to CBPP data, children in mixed status families would experience a disproportionate impact from this policy, accounting for nearly half of the individuals in these households. Although the vast majority (nearly 96%) of these children are U.S. citizens, as minors they would be unable to stay in subsidized housing if an ineligible parent or guardian is removed through this rule change.
Current policy has for decades aimed to address the vulnerabilities of low-income families with children. Studies have shown that housing vouchers, a major component of HUD subsidies, are connected with better educational outcomes and prospects for children in these households.
“The harm ripples out with chilling effects extended to immigrant communities more broadly,” said Tran-Leung.
Increased homelessness
In the Federal Register posting for the proposed rule, HUD acknowledged it “would adversely affect some tenants” in subsidized housing, as well as “responsible entities.” But the agency justified the move as a matter of “the reallocation of HUD funds to the intended recipients.”
In response, the California Association of Housing Authorities (CAHA) wrote, “Three in four eligible households nationwide already go unassisted due to chronic underfunding. This rule does not address that underlying scarcity. It simply reshuffles limited resources while increasing instability and reducing the overall number of families we serve.”
The authors added, “In California’s high-cost rental markets, the loss of rental assistance almost certainly results in displacement into homelessness. Affordable alternatives simply do not exist at sufficient scale.”
Yelos agrees. “Certainly a lot of people are going to end up on the streets” as a result of the change, she said. “It’ll increase homelessness in L.A., and it will also affect social stability, because we have so many mixed status families, just given the population of Los Angeles.”
Housing as immigration enforcement
The proposed rule would require citizens to submit documentation verifying their citizenship, and consent to this information being shared with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In addition, immigrants over 62 would need to provide documentation of their eligibility for the first time.
“It seems that HUD is trying to turn Public Housing Authorities and providers into immigration enforcement units,” says Tran-Leung. In fact, HUD had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with DHS in March, 2025 to participate in immigration enforcement.
Volunteers with People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER) participate in a letter writing campaign in response to HUD’s proposed rule change. (Image courtesy of People Organized for Westside Renewal)
The updated policy would also utilize the federal government’s SAVE database to verify citizenship status. Trump has been pushing Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would use this same database for verifying voter eligibility.
“Folks have raised a lot of concerns about that in the voting context,” said Acosta, “but they’re trying to do similar things here.” The move, she says, “raises a lot of privacy concerns of sharing that kind of information with the Department of Homeland Security.”
Getting the word out
When HUD attempted to introduce a similar rule change in 2019 during Trump’s first term, 95% of more than 30,000 comments submitted to the federal register opposed the move. President Biden withdrew the proposal shortly after taking office.
Tran-Leung says this current effort could meet a similar fate.
“The rule is very problematic and could face a legal challenge in the future,” she said. “This is layering on more chaos through the housing system.”
As for Micaela, she isn’t waiting around to find out, but is instead actively fighting to keep families like hers under one roof.
“We are going out to motivate the community,” she said. “There are a lot of families out there scared of speaking up. We’re knocking on doors, making fliers, doing little teach-ins to motivate them to submit their comments, and also get their kids to submit comments. We want to stay in our homes.”