HUD Secretary: Not ‘Every Single Illegal Resident’ Wants to Scam the System Through Waived Housing Voucher Regulation
(CNSNews.com) – HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge denied Thursday that her agency’s decision to waive a regulation requiring emergency housing vouchers to prove their legal status will “in any significant way” increase the risk that illegal immigrants will obtain housing vouchers that are meant for U.S. citizens.
At a Senate Banking Committee hearing on infrastructure, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) asked the secretary, “So back in March a couple of months ago, our Democratic colleagues passed a spending bill that provided $5 billion for emergency housing vouchers to be distributed to people experiencing homelessness, victims of human trafficking and other circumstances.
“Under that law and HUD’s own regulations, illegal immigrants are not eligible for these vouchers, but just yesterday, Fox Business reported that HUD recently issued guidance that will have the effect of making it easier for illegal immigrants to obtain these emergency housing vouchers that are supposed to be meant for Americans,” he said.
“This happens, because, as I understand it, the new guidance waives an existing HUD regulation that requires public housing authorities to obtain and verify documentation that an applicant for a housing voucher actually has a legal immigration status as opposed to an illegal status at the time of application,” Toomey said.
“HUD’s own regulations say this requirement, the one HUD is waiving if this report is accurate, this requirement is meant to ‘decrease the incidents of fraud, waste, and abuse.’ HUD’s guidance may now allow illegal immigrants to obtain these housing vouchers that as I said are meant for American citizens,” the congressman said.
“So Secretary Fudge, isn’t it important that we follow the law and the HUD regulation and have processes in place to minimize the risk that these vouchers go to people who are not supposed to have them?” he asked.
FUDGE: Yes, Senator. Indeed, it is, and I thank you for the question. I think that it is very, very clear from our May 5th public notice detailing the operating requirements for the emergency housing vouchers program. It is clear that in line with current law, eligibility for assistance is limited to United States citizens and those with legal residency.
TOOMEY: Right, but I’m concerned that this guidance by waiving this rule that HUD has historically used to minimize the risk that illegal immigrants have these vouchers, by waiving this, isn’t it going to increase the risk that illegal immigrants will end up obtaining the housing vouchers that are meant for U.S. citizens?
FUDGE: I do not believe that it will do that in any significant way, Senator. I think that to say that would assume that every single illegal resident wants to come and scam the system. That is not how this works. People who are homeless generally do not have identification. They don’t have Social Security cards, et cetera, and So what we have done is allowed our housing authorities and partners to come up with ways to allow them to at least initially report themselves to self-certify and then we verify. So if we find that someone is in the system that should not be, We certainly will take care of it.
TOOMEY: So first of all my question does not in any way imply that everyone here illegally is looking for these vouchers. There’s no such suggestion. I’m simply saying that if there is not an opportunity to screen out people who are not actually eligible, if we don’t have that mechanism, then there is likely to be some abuse of this system, and it would inevitably will take months at best to discover and then litigate and adjudicate these cases.
I would just urge you to reconsider this. This is HUD’s own regulation that’s being waived is described by HUD as serving the purpose of decreasing incidents of fraud, waste and abuse. So I would---
FUDGE: I am certainly willing to do so, Sir. I will take another look at it.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing.
HUD’s $5 Billion Taxpayer Funded Program Gives Rent Money to Illegal Aliens
Illegal migrants are being allowed to get taxpayer funds to pay their rent as part of a $5 billion Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program announced this week.
When asked about whether she would enforce the Trump-era rule that only citizens can receive the vouchers, Fudge said, “The answer is no.”
“We are doing everything we can possibly to take any living person in this nation off the streets,” Fudge told reporters. “That’s kind of our posture.”
The Washington Times reported on the expansion of President Joe Biden’s open border policies:
Ms. Fudge announced that HUD will use money from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package signed into law in February to provide 70,000 emergency housing vouchers nationwide to about 750 local housing authorities. She said it will help about 130,000 people find or keep safe, quality housing.
HUD’s most recent count of the U.S. homeless population in January 2020 found about 580,000 people living on the streets, up 2 percent from the previous year. But Ms. Fudge said the pandemic has worsened the problem in the U.S., with more people homeless or at risk of losing their homes. The money will be distributed to communities within the next 30 to 60 days.
Oakland, California, Mayor Libby Schaaf said her city will receive 504 vouchers to help some of the roughly 4,000 homeless people [in that city]. She said there are also about 750 people living in temporary hotel rooms or trailers provided by FEMA during the pandemic.
“We are providing communities the resources to give homes to the people who have had to endure the COVID-19 pandemic without one,” Fudge said. “These housing vouchers will allow us to not put these people back on the street, but to move them into permanent, affordable, safe, healthy housing.”
“The supplemental funding is allocated through the HOME Investment Partnerships Program to 651 grantees, including states, insular areas, and local governments,” the press release announcing the move said.
Migrants compete with Americans for housing, which, in turn, raises housing costs for citizens.
The press release included a link that shows the amounts being paid out to localities across the country.
“The nearly $5 billion in HOME-ARP funding is the first of two homelessness-related funding opportunities from the American Rescue Plan that HUD will release,” the announcement said. “In the coming weeks, HUD will announce the allocation of funding for emergency vouchers for people experiencing and at-risk of homelessness.”
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Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
According to a report in the Washington Times:
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “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 Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
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