July 24, 2019
Page 9
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O PINION
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Trump Rule Would Displace 55,000 Children
A cruel targeting
of immigrant
families
r ose r amirez and d edriCk
a sante -m uhammad
In 1968 — just a week after
Martin Luther King Jr.’s assas-
sination — Congress passed the
Fair Housing Act, or FHA.
The law secured everyone’s
right to housing regardless of race,
national origin, disability, familial
status, sex, or religion. The FHA
protects people from discrimina-
tion when they’re renting, getting
a mortgage, or seeking housing
assistance — including applying
for public housing or housing
vouchers.
Now the Trump administration
is going against that legacy, pro-
posing a regulation that will target
immigrant families living in gov-
ernment-subsidized housing.
They want to require every
single family member in federal-
ly assisted housing to have their
immigration status screened by
the Department of Homeland Se-
by
curity. If just one resident is un-
documented, the new policy will
effectively block the entire house-
hold from receiving any housing
benefits — even for legally docu-
mented residents and citizens.
Undocumented people are al-
ready ineligible to apply for gov-
ernment benefits. Instead, the rule
directly targets “mixed-status”
member who is currently ineli-
gible (which doesn’t necessarily
mean they’re undocumented ei-
ther — immigrants can have legal
status and still not be eligible for
public assistance programs).
In short, this rule will have
an unprecedented discriminato-
ry impact on families from other
countries, regardless of their legal
It would force a mother,
who might be ineligible for
benefits on her own, to face the
impossible choice of separating
from her child so they could
keep their home, or forcing the
entire family into homelessness.
families. In mixed-status fami-
lies — who all contain members
who are legally eligible for public
benefits — subsidies are only pro-
vided to those eligible members.
The family pays the prorated mar-
ket rent for all non-eligible family
members in the household.
So the proposed rule will oblit-
erate affordable housing options
for low-income Americans simply
for having an immigrant family
status — a clear violation of the
FHA’s prohibition of discrimina-
tion based on national origin.
It’s yet another attack from this
administration again immigrants
— and a way to continue its sep-
aration of immigrant families. It
would force a mother, who might
be ineligible for benefits on her
own, to face the impossible choice
of separating from her child so
they could keep their home, or
forcing the entire family into
homelessness.
The government’s own analysis
shows that more than 55,000 chil-
dren — who are U.S. citizens or
otherwise eligible to receive hous-
ing benefits — could face eviction
under the proposed rule.
“This cruel and needless target-
ing of struggling immigrant fam-
ilies,” members of the House Fi-
nancial Services Committee wrote
to Secretary Ben Carson, “only
contributes to historic patterns of
inequality, which ultimately hin-
der the U.S. housing market and
American economy.”
The families impacted the ad-
ministration’s cruelty will suffer
a grave injustice even after doing
everything right under U.S. law.
They face being ripped apart sim-
ply because some of their family
members were born somewhere
else.
This is a sad reality for many
immigrant Americans, and partic-
ularly for the Latino community,
which appears to be a primary tar-
get of the Trump administration.
The Trump administration cannot
target these communities — there
is strength in numbers, and we
will not allow them to prevail.
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is
chief of equity inclusion and Rose
Ramirez is a civil rights investi-
gator at the National Community
Reinvestment Coalition.
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