The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has issued a new rule to ensure that the four million people in need of public housing and house choice vouchers can be moved off of years-long waiting lists by enforcing federal law that requires the government to only give assistance to U.S. citizens.

Citing a HUD analysis of the rule, which was done by career staff and not Trump administration officials, the Washington Post reported that as many as 55,000 children in households with family members who are in the country illegally could face “eviction” and “homelessness.” 

The Post reported:

Approximately 25,000 households, representing about 108,000 people, now living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member, according to the HUD analysis.

Among these mixed-status households, 70 percent, or 76,000 people, are legally eligible for benefits — of whom 55,000 are children, HUD says. The vast majority live in California, Texas and New York.

But the Post fails to cite the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980, that, according to Section 214, HUD is “prohibited from granting financial assistance to persons other than United States citizens, nationals, or certain categories of eligible non-citizens.”

“There is an affordable housing crisis in this country, and we need to make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said of the new regulation. “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 regulation, posted on the Federal Register, states, in part, about how the Act would be amended:

The proposed rule would require the verification of the eligible immigration status of all recipients of assistance under a covered program who are under the age of 62. As a result, the proposed rule would make prorated assistance a temporary condition pending verification of eligible status, as opposed to under the current regulation where it could continue indefinitely. 

The proposed rule would also specify that individuals who are not ineligible immigration status may not serve as the leaseholder, even as part of a mixed family whose assistance is prorated based on the percentage of members with eligible status. 

HUD believes the amendments will bring its regulations into greater alignment with the wording and purpose of Section 214.

HUD provided Breitbart News with some of the statistics on how many Americans in cities across the United States are in need of housing assistance, including 1.6 million waiting for public housing and 2.6 million who are in line for housing choice vouchers.

Hundreds of thousands of people are waiting in cities like Los Angeles and New York City, according to a HUD survey.

• Only 1 in 4 qualified households currently receive housing assistance in this country. That means, 3 out of 4 families who might otherwise qualify for our programs do not get any help to pay their rent whatsoever.

• If current recipients are representative of those waiting for HUD assistance, most are extremely poor seniors or persons living with a disability.

• In some states, public housing waitlists are closed and local public housing agencies are not even accepting new applicants.

But the Post painted a negative picture of the rule, siding with immigrants.

“Tens of thousands of deeply poor kids, mostly U.S. citizens, could be evicted and made homeless because of this rule, and — by HUD’s own admission — there would be no benefit to families on the waiting list,” Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said in the Post report.

Yentel was referring to the HUD analysis, not the Trump administration in place at the agency.

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