Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing a new rule to keep illegal immigrants from skirting current rules that prevent those immigrants from accessing housing subsidies.
“We need to make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” department Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement. “Given the overwhelming demand for our programs, fairness requires that we devote ourselves to legal residents who have been waiting, some for many years, for access to affordable housing.”
The new rule would disallow illegal immigrants from living in houses that receive subsidies from the department regardless of whether they were the direct recipient or not. Previously, rules allowed illegal immigrants to benefit from subsides by living with relatives who were citizens.
“This proposal gets to the whole point Cher was making in her tweet that the President retweeted. We’ve got our own people to house and we need to take care of our citizens,” an official in the Trump administration told the Daily Caller.
“Because of past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime,” the official added.
The administration estimates about 32,000 households nationwide benefit from federal housing subsidies despite being headed by illegal immigrants.
