U.S. Citizen Children in Mixed-Status Families Face Displacement Under Proposed HUD Rule

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Jamie Ramos is a U.S. Citizen. Her husband has a work permit and a Social Security number. Her five children are reported to be U.S. Citizens, though that status has not been independently confirmed in primary source documentation. He also has an active immigration court case called Cancellation of Removal (a legal process where an immigration judge can decide to let someone stay in the country permanently). Not a single federal dollar subsidizes his share of the family’s rent. Their housing assistance is already prorated: the government covers only the eligible members of the household, and the family pays the rest out of pocket.

Under a rule proposed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development on February 20, 2026, the Ramos family would lose their housing anyway. The proposed rule eliminates the prorated model, making any household with an ineligible member ineligible for assistance, regardless of who else lives there or what legal rights they hold.

“My children will lose their home simply because of their father’s status,” Ramos wrote in a public comment, “despite the fact that our current assistance is already prorated, meaning we receive zero subsidy for my husband.”

Housing advocates, pediatricians, and legal scholars have called this outcome a core injustice in HUD’s proposed rule on mixed-status family housing eligibility, arguing that it effectively punishes U.S. Citizens for their family circumstances. The administration frames the rule differently: as straightforward enforcement of statutory eligibility requirements that have long been on the books. Under that view, household composition decisions remain within each family’s control. The government is not targeting citizen children. It is enforcing rules about who qualifies for a federally funded program, and families retain the choice of how to configure their households. The rule would end a three-decade-old practice that has let families with mixed immigration statuses stay in federally assisted housing, with rental subsidies calculated only for eligible members. In its place: a near-total ban, with a narrow 30-day verification window before ineligible households lose assistance entirely.

How the Current Prorated System Works, and What the Proposed Rule Would Change

Here is the part that trips people up: the current system does not give housing benefits to undocumented immigrants. It never has. Under Section 214 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980, rental assistance is prorated to cover only eligible household members for qualifying mixed-status families — those who received assistance as of June 19, 1995, or are in pending verification status. If a family of four has one ineligible member, they receive roughly 75 percent of what a fully eligible four-person household would receive. The ineligible member’s proportional share of rent comes out of the family’s own income. Federal money does not touch it.

This prorated model has been HUD policy since 1995. It is not a loophole. It is a deliberate regulatory structure that Congress created because it saw an obvious reality: families do not sort neatly by immigration status. A U.S. Citizen child may have an undocumented parent. A lawful permanent resident may be married to someone whose visa lapsed. The prorated model keeps families together while ensuring federal dollars flow only to eligible recipients.

That model would end under the proposed rule. After a brief verification window, any household with an ineligible member would lose assistance entirely. Families would face a choice that housing advocates have called unacceptable: separate so eligible members can keep their housing subsidy, or stay together and lose federal support. For the Ramos family and thousands like them, there is no good option in that framework.

Documentation requirements would tighten across the board as well. Currently, eligible immigrants aged 62 and older can prove eligibility with proof of age and a signed declaration. Under the proposed rule, all eligible noncitizens, regardless of age, would need to provide a signed declaration, acceptable documentation, and a signed consent form. People who have in the past chosen not to claim eligible immigration status would no longer have that option. Everyone would have to prove their status.

Competing Estimates: 24,000 Ineligible Members vs. 79,600 People Displaced

HUD Secretary Scott Turner has framed the rule as a matter of program integrity. The agency estimates approximately 24,000 ineligible people live in roughly 20,000 mixed-status households in HUD-assisted housing, and Turner has stated the rule would redirect $218 million to American families.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the rule would displace 79,600 people, including nearly 37,000 U.S. Citizen children. The gap between 24,000 and 80,000 is not a mystery. It is a question of how you count.

HUD counts ineligible household members, the people not currently receiving a subsidy. Advocates count everyone who would lose housing when a household loses eligibility. When a family of four loses assistance because one member is ineligible, HUD records one affected person. Advocates record four. Both numbers are accurate. They are answering different questions.

Of the roughly 79,600 people CBPP estimates would be affected, 86 percent are Latino, 56 percent are women or girls, and 46 percent are minors. Among those minors, CBPP estimates approximately 37,000 hold U.S. Citizenship. They were born here. They have every legal right to be here. They would face homelessness not because of anything they did, but because of a family member’s status.

The legal and constitutional status of U.S. Citizen children born to undocumented parents is itself under pressure in other contexts. Our earlier analysis of the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case covers that background in detail. The HUD rule adds a separate layer: even if a child’s citizenship is uncontested, their housing security is now at risk.

The following table shows how the competing impact estimates break down by category:

Sources: HUD press release, February 2026; Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis via NLIHC. HUD’s estimate counts ineligible individuals not currently subsidized; advocates’ estimate counts all household members who would lose housing assistance.

Mandatory USCIS Referrals: Housing Authorities as Immigration Enforcement Points

The proposed rule includes a provision that has gotten far less attention than the displacement estimates but raises serious legal questions.

Under this provision, public housing authorities (PHAs) would be required to report ineligible tenants to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They would not merely deny assistance but actively refer tenants. Local housing agencies, whose legal mission is providing affordable homes, would become immigration enforcement referral points.

The National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO), whose CEO is Mark Thiele, put it plainly in an organizational statement: “Turning housing providers into immigration enforcement intermediaries stretches Section 214 beyond recognition.” NAHRO represents PHAs nationwide, and that concern is rooted in practical reality. PHAs already verify eligibility. What is new is the required duty to report ineligible individuals to a federal immigration agency. That is a function with no connection to running housing programs.

This raises a constitutional question that has not gotten enough attention: whether the federal government can require state and local agencies to carry out federal immigration enforcement functions. The Supreme Court addressed something similar in Printz v. United States (1997), holding that Congress cannot directly force state law enforcement officers to carry out federal law. The Court based that holding on the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of powers to the states, as well as historical practice, the constitutional structure of dual sovereignty, and separation of powers principles. The reasoning was that forcing state officials to perform federal functions violates basic federalism principles.

Whether that doctrine applies clearly to PHAs is genuinely uncertain. PHAs are local bodies created under state law, but they run a federal program with federal funding. A court might view mandatory USCIS reporting as an allowable requirement tied to receiving federal funding. Or it might view it as crossing into commandeering, forcing state agencies to do the federal government’s work. That is unsettled ground, and unsettled constitutional ground is exactly where litigation begins. If the rule is finalized, this provision is likely to be challenged.

There is also a practical problem. If word spreads that living in public housing draws immigration scrutiny, eligible members of mixed-status families, including U.S. Citizens, may avoid applying for assistance altogether. Housing instability among the people HUD is supposed to serve would worsen, and none of that would show up in HUD’s accounting.

For more on where federal immigration enforcement can and cannot operate, our coverage of the sensitive locations policy explains the existing limits on ICE enforcement activity near schools, hospitals, and churches. Housing authorities are not currently on that list.

This Has Happened Before

In May 2019, during Trump’s first term, HUD published a nearly identical proposed rule. It would have prohibited mixed-status families from living in certain HUD-assisted housing. The rule received more than 30,000 public comments, more than 95 percent of which opposed it. It was never finalized. When the Biden administration took office in 2021, it officially withdrew the proposal, acknowledging that the rule would “evict and separate immigrant families, putting them at risk of homelessness.”

The National Housing Law Project’s history of the mixed-status rule documents this arc in detail. The first-term proposal also produced an important finding from HUD’s own analysis: the rule would place heavy administrative costs on PHAs while generating minimal fiscal savings. That is because displacing one family does not automatically create equivalent housing for another. Units require maintenance and turnover time. Administrative processing costs are real. The actual money saved after accounting for all costs is far smaller than the headline numbers suggest.

That history is both encouraging and sobering for current advocates. Strong public opposition worked, eventually — but it took a change of administration to withdraw the rule. This time, the political circumstances are more favorable to finalization. The comment period closes April 21, 2026.

Research on Housing Instability and Child Development

The research on this is not ambiguous. show that even a single eviction filing decreases school attendance, with effects that persist for up to two years.

Children who experienced an eviction filing in the year before standardized testing performed worse on tests of memory, math, and vocabulary. The decline was equal to roughly a full year of schooling, according to reports from housing researchers. Frequent moves increase school transfers, which lower the chance of on-time high school completion.

For children in mixed-status families, the harm builds. Research on these families shows higher rates of anxiety, depression, and social isolation among children whose parents have uncertain immigration status. The ongoing anxiety of potential parental deportation is already a documented stressor. Forced displacement from their home adds to that burden.

Children’s HealthWatch, a nonpartisan network of pediatricians, public health researchers, and children’s health and policy experts, stated in response to the proposed rule: “Decades of research demonstrate that family separation is a severe stressor that can disrupt brain development and have lifelong consequences.”

Advocates argue that harm to U.S. Citizen children is not a side effect of this policy but is built into the policy itself. Because U.S. Citizens cannot be deported, displacement from federally assisted housing is the main tool through which their lives are affected. The administration’s counter-argument holds that the rule enforces existing statutory eligibility requirements and that families retain control over their household makeup, including whether an ineligible member stays in the home. Critics find that argument insufficient because, in practice, most low-income mixed-status families cannot afford to split households or to cover the full unsubsidized cost of housing. Legal scholars sometimes describe the citizen-child outcome as “constructive deportation”: the idea that U.S. Citizens can suffer serious constitutional harm through government action targeting their relatives, even when the direct target is the noncitizen. Whether courts would recognize such claims in the housing context is an open question, but it is a real legal weakness in the proposed rule.

The broader question of what due process rights apply to noncitizens in federal proceedings is covered in our earlier piece on due process rights for noncitizens detained inside the U.S. The due process questions for U.S. Citizen children in mixed-status families are distinct, and they remain largely unlitigated.

The Administration’s Strongest Argument

The housing affordability crisis is real, and the administration’s case deserves a serious hearing rather than being brushed aside.

In New York, the average wait for a Section 8 voucher runs approximately 51 months. Los Angeles: four to eight years. Chicago’s waitlist has been closed since 2008; the five-to-seven-year estimate applies only to the roughly 25,000 families already on the list from when it last opened in 2014. Nationally, the average wait is 27 months, and that number increased 8 percent between 2023 and 2024. These are not abstract statistics. They represent millions of low-income Americans, many of them U.S. Citizens, veterans, seniors, and people with disabilities, waiting for assistance that never comes. For those families, every unit occupied by an ineligible household member is a unit unavailable to them. That is a fair grievance.

HUD’s Ben Hobbs, Assistant Secretary of Public and Indian Housing, has publicly framed the rule as a matter of prioritizing limited resources for eligible families, though the specific statement attributed to him in this context is drawn from HUD’s official press release rather than a direct interview. That framing has real moral weight for anyone who has spent years on a waitlist.

Three distinct arguments support the administration’s strongest case. First, even a small shift of scarce vouchers to eligible families on waitlists has real value to those specific families. A family that has waited years for a Section 8 voucher in New York is genuinely helped even if the overall housing shortage remains. Second, program integrity has its own value as a principle. Enforcing eligibility rules discourages future ineligible enrollment and maintains public trust in means-tested programs, regardless of net fiscal savings. Third, funding levels and eligibility rules are separate policy tools. Congress could separately set aside additional funds, and setting correct eligibility boundaries now does not close off that possibility.

NAHRO’s Thiele raises a serious challenge to the fiscal accounting specifically: “The promise to ‘redirect $218 million’ assumes a cost-free one-to-one swap: remove mixed-status families and house others. That is not how housing works.” Displacing a family does not automatically create equivalent assistance for a new family. Units go through transition periods. Administrative costs add up. And three in four eligible families nationwide go unassisted not because ineligible tenants are occupying their units, but because Congress has not set aside enough money to fund the program fully. HUD’s own analysis of the first-term proposal projected a net cost increase of approximately $200 million per year; turnover and administrative costs were acknowledged but left largely unquantified, and the $218 million savings figure did not survive scrutiny. The evidence weakens the specific $218 million claim. It does not necessarily settle the separate questions of program integrity and eligibility enforcement as independent policy goals.

Downstream Effects: Homelessness, Shelter Capacity, and Property Turnover

They do not disappear. Some will double up with family and friends, creating crowded conditions that carry their own documented harms. Others will enter the homeless services system, a system already stretched past capacity.

In 2024, 771,480 people experienced homelessness on a single night. That was the highest number ever recorded, an 18 percent increase from 2023. No state had enough permanent housing to serve everyone experiencing homelessness. Sixty-one percent of states and territories had less shelter capacity than they had the year before. The system cannot absorb 80,000 additional people. Not in New York. Not in Los Angeles. Not anywhere.

Displacement creates real headaches for property owners currently receiving HUD subsidies. Turnover is expensive. For smaller multifamily properties taking part in HUD programs, losing tenants means lost revenue and added paperwork. Some properties may leave HUD programs entirely, cutting the overall supply of subsidized units and making the housing shortage worse, not better.

Due Process Protections Before Eviction, and Gaps in the Proposed Rule

Before a family can be evicted from federally assisted housing, the law requires certain protections. For public housing, HUD’s grievance procedures require an informal settlement discussion, and if that fails, a formal hearing before a neutral officer where the tenant can present evidence, question witnesses, and have representation. The hearing decision must be in writing with a clear explanation. For Housing Choice Vouchers, similar protections apply under 24 CFR Part 982, including written notice of termination reasons and the right to a hearing.

How those protections interact with ineligibility determinations under the proposed rule is where things get unclear. If HUD finds that an ineligible household member is present and ends assistance to the entire family, does the family get the full grievance hearing process to challenge that finding? Or does HUD’s eligibility finding skip housing-specific grievance procedures? The proposed rule text does not answer that clearly. The uncertainty matters greatly for families’ practical ability to fight termination. It is another legal weakness that advocates will press if the rule is finalized.

The core principle here traces to Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), in which the Supreme Court held that due process requires a formal hearing where evidence is presented before someone loses their government welfare benefits. The principle has been extended to housing contexts in later case law. The specific application to immigration-based ineligibility determinations, however, remains unsettled.

How to Comment, and What Litigation Is Expected If the Rule Is Finalized

The rule is not final and current protections remain in place, but the comment deadline is the immediate actionable moment.

Federal agencies are legally required to review and respond to substantive comments before finalizing a rule. If HUD receives strong opposition, as it did in 2019 when more than 95 percent of 30,000 comments opposed the first-term version, it creates legal pressure to change or drop the proposal. Courts have issued stays and remanded rules to agencies that failed to adequately address significant comments — as in the Supreme Court’s 2024 Ohio v. EPA decision — though outright invalidation is less common than a stay pending further review. The record built during this comment period will also be the foundation for any later litigation.

Comments can be submitted through Regulations.gov. The comment process is open to all members of the public — those who support the rule’s eligibility enforcement goals, those who oppose its displacement effects, and those with technical expertise on implementation.

The National Housing Law Project has published a “Know Your Rights” resource in English and Spanish explaining current rules and protections for immigrant families in HUD housing. For mixed-status families currently in HUD-assisted housing, legal consultation before acting on any housing decision is advisable, as the rule has not yet been finalized and current protections remain in place.

The National Housing Law Project, the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, and the National Immigration Law Center are reviewing the rule’s legal weaknesses and are expected to file detailed comments. Litigation is likely if the rule is finalized. The legal questions are serious enough that courts will have to work through them. Those questions include whether HUD has the legal power under its governing law to impose a total ban rather than prorated assistance. They also include mandatory USCIS reporting and the constitutional rule against forcing state agencies to do federal work. A third question involves disparate impact on Latino families under the Fair Housing Act, the federal law that prohibits housing discrimination. Disparate impact is the legal argument that a policy discriminates by hitting one racial group far harder than others. Readers should note that while disparate impact remains a recognized legal theory under the FHA per Inclusive Communities (2015), HUD has proposed rescinding its disparate impact regulations as of early 2026, which may affect how such claims are administratively processed, though courts may still recognize the theory.

For a broader look at how federal benefit programs treat mixed-status families, including how U.S. Citizen children can access benefits their undocumented parents cannot, our coverage of FEMA disaster assistance for mixed-status families covers the parallel structure in emergency relief programs. The HUD rule, if finalized, would move federal housing policy in the opposite direction from how those programs currently operate.

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