HUD to Finally Stop Illegal Aliens from “Riding the Coattails of Hardworking American Taxpayers”

In the Trump administration’s latest effort to put a dent in the enormous cost of providing illegal immigrants with welfare benefits, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has launched a nationwide audit of public housing authorities to assure tenants are eligible. Over half of illegal alien households in the United States use at least one taxpayer-funded welfare program, according to congressional testimony provided recently by the Washington D.C. think tank Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and it costs the government tens of billions of dollars. One major area of concern is government-subsidized public housing, which became available to illegal aliens under policies established by the Biden administration as a record number of migrants entered the country through the Mexican border.

Earlier this year, in an effort to reverse the damage amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis, HUD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to end the wasteful misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to benefit illegal aliens instead of American citizens, especially veterans in need. Under the agreement HUD provided a full-time staff member to assist in operations at the Incident Command Center (ICC), creating an interagency partnership to facilitate data sharing and ensure taxpayer-funded housing programs are not used to harbor or benefit illegal aliens. “We will safeguard precious taxpayer resources, and we will stop the harmful practices of the former Biden Administration, which favored and prioritized illegal aliens over American citizens in the expenditure of housing funds and subsidies,” the HUD-DHS MOU states. Within days HUD announced that illegal immigrants would no longer qualify for government-backed mortgages through a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) program that lends to “non-permanent residents.” The new policy ensures that illegal aliens cannot access FHA-insured financing and refocuses the use of taxpayer-funded federal housing programs to benefit U.S. citizens.

A few days ago, HUD Secretary Scott Turner took another critical step, sending a letter to over 3,000 Public Housing Authorities (PHA) around the nation requiring citizenship information for residents of the Section 8 program, which is funded by HUD and managed by local PHAs. Illegal aliens are not supposed to benefit from Section 8 housing, but enforcement has been lax for years and an estimated 100,000 non-citizens receive the taxpayer-funded subsidies. The audit will help clear the rolls and free resources to prioritize the needs of American citizens, according to Turner. PHAs have 30 days to provide tenant names, addresses, unit size and cost, number of people per unit and proof of American citizenship or eligible immigration status. “This information is required by law and this administration is upholding the law to its fullest extent,” Turner, a former Texas state legislator and professional football player, writes in the letter. “No longer will illegal aliens be able to leave citizenship boxes blank or take advantage of HUD-funded housing, riding the coattails of hardworking American taxpayers.”

The nation’s housing secretary goes on to reveal that his agency currently serves only one out of four eligible families due in part to the lack of enforcement of prohibition against federally funded assistance to illegal aliens. “HUD will leverage all available enforcement actions against entities who do not comply with the request for citizenship information, including but not limited to, examination of HUD funding and/or evaluation of PHA program eligibility,” Scott’s letter to the country’s PHA’s states. Public housing advocates claim the crackdown will destabilize poor families and worsen the nation’s housing crisis. “No matter where we come from, how long we’ve lived here, or what language we speak, our country has the resources to ensure that all of us have a safe place to call home,” said an official with the National Housing Law Project, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing housing justice for poor people. “But Trump and Turner are threatening to take away the funding necessary to keep millions of people housed, despite tenants across the country struggling to make ends meet. Rather than address sky-high rents, increasing evictions, and record homelessness, Trump and Turner are forcing public housing authorities to divert their limited resources away from affordable housing and towards wasteful policy designed to cause fear and hardship among immigrant families and scare them into self-evicting.”

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