Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner bluntly told Fox’s Saturday in America that illegal immigration is directly fueling the housing crisis and pricing out young Americans who are trying to buy their first homes. This isn’t woke spin — it’s basic supply-and-demand reality: millions more people chasing a finite housing stock drives prices up and squeezes out the next generation.
The Turner-led HUD has moved from talk to action, coordinating with Homeland Security and pressing Public Housing Authorities to provide full tenant accounting and proof of eligible immigration status to ensure federal housing dollars go to Americans first. These are the kinds of common-sense steps conservatives have demanded for years — using government data to make sure taxpayers aren’t subsidizing illegal residency.
Let’s be clear: prioritizing citizens for taxpayer-funded assistance is not cruelty, it is fairness. While the open-borders crowd and the Biden-era policies have created a magnet for mass migration, the Trump HUD is actually doing the hard work of defending American families and taxpayers from being crowded out of housing and services.
Turner has explicitly required PHAs to account for every tenant receiving HUD support and to provide proof of citizenship or lawful status within tight timeframes, a move designed to restore the integrity of programs like Section 8. If bureaucrats or woke local officials refuse to comply, the administration has signaled it will leverage funding and oversight to force compliance — exactly the kind of accountability Washington usually avoids.
Predictably, the usual suspects are squealing about privacy and paperwork, but Americans would do well to remember who’s paying the bills. When hardworking families can’t afford a starter home or an apartment because federal dollars are stretched thin, the moral obligation is to the citizens who built this country, not to those who sneaked across the border.
Yes, the administration’s use of interagency data-sharing has drawn criticism from civil liberties hawks and some media outlets concerned about privacy and civil liberties, but law-abiding citizens should expect their government to enforce eligibility for benefits with lawful tools. The alternative is to let politics and permissive policies continue to hollow out opportunity for Americans and leave an entire generation shut out of homeownership.
The real conservative solution goes beyond enforcement: we must increase housing supply, cut needless zoning barriers, and get government out of the way of builders so prices come down permanently. But supply-side reforms won’t work if open-border migration keeps adding artificial demand; you can’t fix prices by building if the fence is wide open.
Scott Turner is doing what should have been done years ago — defending American families and restoring integrity to federal housing programs. Patriots who care about their children’s future should applaud these moves, pressure local officials to comply, and demand both border enforcement and pro-growth housing reforms so young Americans can finally buy a home again.
