The Trump administration hasn’t wasted any time working on the president’s signature campaign promise: carrying out the largest mass deportation program in history. Over the past several months, ICE has ramped up operations to meet a target of 3,000 arrests per day.
President Donald Trump has long blamed unchecked immigration for a bevy of problems in the U.S., including the ever-growing housing shortage. And though research suggests that mass deportations would actually exacerbate the problem, the administration is pushing forward, deploying ICE agents more rigorously into rental communities. The agency has even issued subpoenas to landlords demanding they hand over tenant records, including rental applications and ID cards. These orders are not signed by a judge and may not even be legal.
And last week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development demanded that public housing authorities provide the agency with information about renters who receive Section 8 vouchers and those who live in government-based housing—including their immigration status and home address. In a release, HUD Secretary Scott Turner stated, “HUD only serves one out of four eligible families due, in part, to the lack of enforcement of prohibition against federally funded assistance to illegal aliens.”
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Given how central a role the administration’s anti-immigration policy is to its housing plans, tenant organizers across the U.S. are shifting tactics to better help communities fight back against an emboldened immigration authority and the landlords who are looking to weaponize today’s political environment.
But immigrants—regardless of their legal status—are afraid, and organizers say it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get them to believe they still have rights.
Emboldening Landlords
Increased ICE raids and the prospect of a subpoena can encourage some landlords to discriminate against immigrant communities, even if they are living in the U.S. legally. This can take the form of choosing not to rent to immigrant households, adding additional fees to leases, or responding to maintenance requests with threats of eviction or calls to ICE.
It’s certainly not the first time landlords have used the threat of ICE against vulnerable tenants. But with the current administration, landlords “have more permission to do it,” says Sandra Alvarez, an organizer with Poder Casas Móviles, a housing justice group that serves mobile home residents in Tucson, Arizona. “They can [find] any reason to evict.”
We were hearing from our communities—especially in rural Oregon—about community members struggling to access housing because of their immigration status.”
Hannah Alzgal, Unite Oregon
Every person in the United States has federal fair housing rights regardless of immigration status, but discrimination is not explicitly prohibited under the Fair Housing Act, which only names discrimination against “national origin.”
Several states do prohibit landlords from discriminating against tenants based on immigration or citizenship status, including California, Colorado, Illinois, and—most recently—Oregon, which passed a law in May that explicitly labels immigration status as a protected class under Oregon’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Act.
Hannah Alzgal, who leads statewide housing policy work for the advocacy group Unite Oregon, says the law had been in the works for years, but the timing of its passage was fortuitous as “the threats are amplified tenfold because [landlords] have greater institutional backing” under the new administration.
“It’s incredibly timely in this moment,” says Alzgal. “We were hearing from our communities—especially in rural Oregon—about community members struggling to access housing because of their immigration status, [and] being specifically asked what their status is, even though there’s no need for a landlord to inquire about that.”
[RELATED ARTICLE: HUD’s Cooperation with ICE Stokes Fear in Immigrant Communities]
Excluding Oregon’s new law, the other states’ protections have been tested to some extent this year. In January, a judge issued a preliminary injunction against a landlord in Aurora, Colorado, who allegedly threatened to report his tenants—a Venezuelan couple with pending asylum applications—to immigration enforcement. Three months later, the first case to reach judgment under the Illinois Immigrant Tenant Protection Act of 2019 awarded immigrant tenants more than $80,000 in damages after they sued their former landlords for threatening to call ICE on them.
And in July, amid Los Angeles County’s “deportation summer,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a consumer alert reminding landlords that it is illegal under state law to threaten to disclose a tenant’s immigration status to ICE.
But ICE has routinely violated what few constitutional limits are in place to restrain it—even defying court orders—prompting tenant organizers to adapt their public education from “Know Your Rights” trainings to role-playing contingency plans when their rights are violated.
“We have such a lack of certainty in how the current governance models are moving that it’s very difficult to actually give people any sense of assurance at the moment,” says Amanda Pham Haines, Unite Oregon’s housing justice manager. “Usually, we can say, ‘Knowing your rights is power.’ Now, we say, ‘Know your rights, but also know that just because you have rights doesn’t mean they won’t be violated.’ It’s a different conversation.”
A Culture of Fear
Even with the law on their side, the fear of arrest and deportation has done the work of undermining immigrant tenants’ rights and providing cover for landlords anyway.
“They are afraid to go to court [or] to have an encounter with any officer,” says Imelda Esquer, another organizer with Poder Casas Móviles. “They are afraid to cause any issue, even to advocate for themselves.”
ICE arrests at courthouses haven’t helped either.
The Latino immigrant community thinks that they don’t have any rights. For me, the hard part is getting them to understand that they do.”
Sandra Alvarez, an organizer with Poder Casas Móviles
In addition to organizing around tenants’ issues, like high utility bills or deteriorating units, Poder Casas Móviles has also been facilitating Know Your Rights trainings, inviting lawyers and other advocates to come speak with tenants and answer questions. But it’s become increasingly difficult to gather an audience.
“It’s a really big [challenge] for people to feel confident,” says Alvarez of Poder Casas Móviles. “When we knock on doors and ask people if they have issues with the landlord, they say, ‘not really,’ but we see that there are a lot of problems. If we continue talking with them, they begin to talk about all of the issues, [but] if we ask if they want to go to a meeting or talk about the situation with lawyers, many times they say no.”
[RELATED ARTICLE: In the Trump 2.0 Era, ‘Organizing Is the Antidote’]
Intimidation doesn’t just come from landlords; terrified tenants are also paying attention to an ongoing national discourse on immigration that vilifies them but also blames them for the housing crisis.
“Because the people in power call us illegals, the Latino immigrant community thinks that they don’t have any rights,” says Alvarez. “For me, the hard part is [getting] them to understand that they do.”
Planning for the Worst
Meanwhile, tenant organizers are working overtime to prevent the projected rise in evictions as heads of households are swept up in raids, and those left behind struggle to pay rent without them. Equally, the loss of income due to entire workplaces being shut down post-raids also serves to push families out of their homes—and potentially out on the street, at a time made even more dangerous by Trump’s criminalization of homelessness.
Like Unite Oregon, City Life/Vida Urbana (CLVU), a grassroots community organization in Massachusetts, is also having conversations with its community members.
“We’re now working on what to do if a loved one is detained,” says Gabriela Cartagena, CLVU communications co-director. “A lot of times, we see multiple families living in the same unit and splitting up the rent, so they are very dependent on each other month to month to pay an extremely high rent that they just can’t afford on their own. So we’re asking, ‘What is your safety or financial plan?’”
We’re now working on what to do if a loved one is detained. They are very dependent on each other … to pay an extremely high rent that they just can’t afford on their own. So we’re asking, ‘What is your safety or financial plan?’
Gabriela Cartagena, City Life/Vida Urbana
It’s a painful discussion, but one that Cartagena says makes tenants feel seen and supported, especially where it concerns the ones left behind. In May, a 12-year-old boy was left alone on the street after his guardian was taken in an immigration raid in Waltham, Massachusetts. It’s every parent’s nightmare, which CLVU helps them prepare against.
“Who is going to be the first person you call if you are detained? What is going to happen to your children? Who’s going to take them to school the next day? Are they going to school the next day? If you’re gone for more than a month, who’s gonna watch your kids? Do your kids have IDs? If not, let’s start making a plan to get them identification,” says Cartagena. “It’s not only about building community trust, but [also] using it as an opportunity to share more on know-your-rights, connecting each other to different resources, and understanding what it means for you to want to protect a neighbor.”
When asked how to keep tenants housed, tenant organizers and advocates say that their sights are still set on rent control, but fighting evictions, especially in this climate of pronounced fear, remains the task before them. That means encouraging tenants to still show up to court.
“City Life has trained [some] community members who have fought their evictions in court, and those same people—some of them undocumented—are taking their knowledge and sharing it with other neighbors because they feel comfortable enough with knowing and explaining their basic rights and what to do if their rights are being violated,” says Cartagena. “The tools of eviction defense are some of the same tools that are being used in moments like now.”
Yusra Murad, communications organizer for Minneapolis-based Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (also known as United Renters for Justice), says that eviction and deportation are interlocking systems of oppression for immigrant communities, benefiting the same institutions, and should be treated as such. “There is no housing justice without immigrant justice,” she says.
And if they are the same battle, then the same strategies can likewise be applied.
“How we keep everyone housed is about power—who has it and who doesn’t—and what it would take to shift the power imbalances that threaten every single one of us,” says Murad. “Whether [it] comes through eviction, deportation, gentrification, or a climate crisis, our purpose is to protect people from displacement.”
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