Trump cracks down on illegal immigrants getting housing assistance

Two Trump Cabinet departments announced changes Thursday aimed at making it tougher for unauthorized immigrants to claim public housing benefits.

Housing and Urban Development proposed a new regulation that would require all applicants for rental assistance to verify their citizenship. The verification currently applies to only a subset of beneficiaries.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the government’s internal legal affairs division, issued an opinion finding that some immigrants with tenuous legal status who currently can claim benefits should be booted off the rolls, under a reinterpretation of the 1996 welfare reform law.

Many people who are here under “parole” status stand to lose access, the department said.

“Today’s opinion will prohibit ineligible aliens from draining funds for housing programs that are meant to help American citizens,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The rules come as the administration moves to rein in what it sees as excessive access to taxpayer benefits by those with, at best, tenuous legal status.

Late last year DOJ released an opinion expanding the definition of public benefits that are subject to the 1996 welfare reform law’s restrictions on immigrant use of means-tested programs.

That law barred legal immigrants from collecting benefits for the first five years here, and had a general prohibition on unauthorized immigrants getting services, though there are exceptions for some medical and education programs, and U.S. citizen children can qualify and their parents can also get funds that way.

A report earlier this month by the Center for Immigration Studies found 61% of households headed by an unauthorized immigrant use at least some welfare programs. That’s higher than legal immigrant homes and those headed by the native-born.

Housing assistance had the lowest use by unauthorized immigrants in the study, with just 2% of homes reporting to the Census Bureau that they received benefits. Those were generally because they were “mixed status” with U.S. citizen children.

HUD, in its new proposal, said it wants to stiffen initial citizenship checks to weed out ineligible people.

It would also close a loophole that the department said allows benefits to flow to mixed-status families where unauthorized immigrants remain silent on their status. With the new verification requirements, those benefits would be better prorated to match only the legal members of the household.

“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,” said HUD Secretary Scott Turner.

HUD’s new regulation is now going through the procedural process of notice and comment.

The regulation builds on a review completed last month that found 6,000 ineligible people on HUD’s rolls, and nearly 200,000 more that needed full verification.