On 9 February 2026, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the Trump regime has given the San Francisco Housing Authority 30 days to confirm that an unspecified list of tenants depending on the organization for rental assistance are U.S. citizens. The demand comes in keeping with a mandate from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, that public housing providers 7nationwide participating in HUD’s funding program account for their tenants’ eligibility for subsidies.
According to a post on HUD.gov, an audit they conducted in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security revealed “nearly 200,000 tenants requiring eligibility verification, nearly 25,000 deceased tenants, and nearly 6,000 ineligible non-American tenants.”
The post also quoted HUD Secretary Scott Turner as saying: “We will leave no stone unturned. We are proud to collaborate with DHS to execute on the President’s agenda of rooting out abuse of taxpayer-funded resources. Ineligible non-citizens have no place to receive welfare benefits. With this new directive and audit, HUD is putting new processes in place to safeguard taxpayer resources and put the American people first.”
Previously, in an open letter to stakeholders and grantees, Turner vowed that HUD would reinforce President Trump’s Executive Order 14218, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” and that “federal housing assistance will no longer be granted to illegal aliens or sanctuary cities.”
According to the Chronicle, one undisclosed nonprofit housing provider confirmed that, last week, HUD contacted some of its tenants and demanded they turn over certain documents within 15 days. However, several other San Francisco nonprofit landlords to whom the Chronicle reached out stated that they were left in the dark about this matter, having neither seen HUD’s list of tenants nor worked out any plan to help targeted households meet HUD’s order. Obviously, numerous housing providers have expressed fearful suspicions that the request for a list of HUD-subsidized tenants could be a pretext for flagging tenants with documentation questions, cutting funding for the San Francisco Housing Authority or both.
While San Francisco's sanctuary city status means that police and other city agencies have the discretion to opt out of assisting federal immigration authorities in enforcing policies, Section 8 recipients are verified for citizenship documentation in order to receive rental assistance and other subsidies.
In a discussion with the Chronicle, Malcolm Yeung, CEO of Chinatown Community Development Center, remarked, “There are different perspectives in the housing world. One is that we were providing that data already, so what’s the difference? And there’s another perspective: This is not a shift so much in terms of requirements — it’s a shift in the level of scrutiny and potential weaponization by the federal government of data, which could be really significant.”
Without question, the mandate from the Trump regime to the San Francisco Housing Authority to confirm that its tenants are U.S. citizens is another attempt to punish the City for protecting vulnerable refugees. Previously, Trump has been firing San Francisco's immigration judges at an alarming rate, beginning in April 2025 while Attorney General Pam Bondi has demanded a list of non-citizen inmates from San Francisco jails and threatened to prosecute the mayors of San Francisco and other sanctuary cities for allegedly obstructing federal law enforcement and otherwise disobeying federal policies.
