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In Santa Rosa, a mother of six children says she’s struggling to pay the rent following her husband’s deportation — but fears eviction if she even requests to move into a smaller place from her landlord.
In Los Angeles, a Latino family sued their landlord and a real estate agent over illegal eviction, only for an attorney to suggest they were likely to be detained by immigration agents before the case could go to trial.
In Oakland, renters have been asked if they were “legal” by a landlord seeking to push them out.
Across the state, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has scooped up swaths of household breadwinners, leaving their families scrambling to afford rent while grieving their absent loved ones. But the impact of those operations stretches further: The fear of deportation alone has discouraged many immigrants from exercising their rights as tenants.
It’s hard enough to be a tenant in California, where rents are among the highest in the country. Immigrants who are living illegally in the country often lack a reliable credit history and work low-paying jobs with tenuous benefits. They already find it harder to secure housing, pay more for the housing they do get, are more likely to live in overcrowded conditions and may be more likely to face eviction.
President Donald Trump’s intensifying immigration crackdown leaves those renters more vulnerable to eviction and exploitation, which could plunge more immigrants into homelessness or overcrowding, or even lead some to “voluntarily” leave the country, housing rights attorneys and scholars say.
The fear of retaliation from landlords has created what advocates describe as a chilling effect on immigrant renters, which “substantially undercuts” California’s strong tenant protection laws, said David Hall, co-directing tenants’ rights attorney with Centro Legal de La Raza, a nonprofit legal aid group in Oakland.
“You can have the most protective laws in the world, but if people are afraid to enforce those laws … it’s like for those people, those laws don’t exist,” he said.
Immigrants already face higher housing barriers
Finding a house. Making the rent. Warding off eviction. Every stage of navigating California’s housing market is already more challenging for California’s immigrant renters compared to their U.S.-born counterparts.
Undocumented immigrant renters have access to far fewer public benefits than U.S. citizens. Even when benefits or services are available, there’s a “lower rate of uptake” among those who are living illegally in the country, due to a lack of awareness and fear of accessing those resources, said Thai V. Le, a research scientist at the USC Equity Research Institute.
Those immigrants are therefore more likely to be rent-burdened, which experts define as paying more than 30% of a household’s income in rent. As of 2021, two-thirds of undocumented renters statewide were rent-burdened, compared to 57% of all immigrant renters and 53% of their U.S.-born peers, according to the California Immigrant Data Portal by the USC Equity Research Institute.
Once they find a place to rent, tenants without legal immigration status are less likely to assert their tenant rights and more likely than others to cram into overcrowded housing leased by friends or family members. Such arrangements often expose tenants to subpar living conditions, deprive them of legal protections because their name is not on the lease, and puts them at higher risk of homelessness should even one of their housemates lose income, said Melissa Chinchilla, a researcher with the Latino Policy and Politics Institute at UCLA.
Seventy percent of foreign-born Latinos in California who are homeless lived in housing they did not hold the lease for, compared to 46% of U.S.-born Latinos, a June 2025 study by the University of California San Francisco found.
And once an undocumented immigrant becomes homeless, it is harder for them to regain housing, Chinchilla said.
“They may not be able to provide a credit check,” she said. “They may be paid cash. So they may not have that history of their income.”
‘Do they want to create waves?’
All those fears and barriers have been dialed up to 11 as Trump has returned to the White House with more force and focus on aggressive, indiscriminate immigration enforcement.
Under his administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have agreed to share residents’ personal data with ICE, which will soon see unprecedented levels of funding. Proposed cuts to immigrants’ access to public benefits such as early childhood education, health care and housing programs threaten the livelihood of families who rely on those services.
“Unfortunately, people’s worst fears are being confirmed,” said Cynthia Moreno, a senior data analyst with the Equity Research Institute.
The Trump administration’s widely publicized deportation blitz “creates a much more vulnerable environment for people who already, in the landlord-tenant relationship, have a disadvantage,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, an attorney at the National Housing Law Project, a tenant rights advocacy group.
California’s tenant protection laws are among the strongest in the nation. They include a statewide cap on how much landlords can hike the rent each year, limits on application fees and security deposits and strict terms and conditions when a landlord moves to kick a tenant out. On paper, those rights apply to tenants, regardless of immigration status.
A 2018 state law bars landlords from asking about or disclosing a tenant’s immigration status to anyone, including federal immigration agents. It’s also illegal for housing providers to harass or threaten tenants over their immigration status.
But not every tenant is aware of or willing to exercise their rights.
“Even if a tenant has a really good landlord, if in the back of their mind they are always worried that (the landlord) could get them on the radar of ICE, a tenant might be deterred or chilled from enforcing these rights,” Hall said.
In the Central Valley, attendance at tenants’ rights workshops has dropped as immigrants fear being targeted by ICE at large events, said Daniela Juarez, a registered legal aid attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance.
“Organizations have stopped advertising their Know Your Rights Workshops and counting on word of mouth instead — for fear of becoming a target. Others are choosing to only do workshops by appointment to not expose their clients,” she wrote in an email. “Overall, they have all seen a chilling effect in services and are worried it will only get worse.”
Families are also afraid to appear in court for housing-related issues as immigration agents regularly detain people at courthouses across the country. In March, news of such an arrest outside the Sonoma County Probation office rippled through the immigrant community in Santa Rosa, said Patrick McDonnell, a housing attorney with Sonoma County Legal Aid.
“We have a lot of clients who are basically willing to take a deal that is not the best deal that we could get them in order to not have to be present in a courthouse,” said McDonnell.
That’s been true even in cases where he and his colleagues believe a landlord’s allegations are “bogus or legally insufficient,” he said. “That person nevertheless is going to have to move out, just because we know that we don’t have a client who we’re going to be able to take to court.”
The fear doesn’t stop there: Asking for a repair. Making an informal complaint. Attending housing rights workshops. Seeking a routine accommodation. For undocumented immigrants, families with mixed immigration status or anyone who might otherwise be concerned about drawing the attention of immigration enforcement agents, such routine interactions have become more fraught.
“Folks are really having to have a risk assessment,” Juarez said. “Do they want to create waves? Do I want to make my landlord upset?”
‘No silver bullet’ to financial hardships
Fear of deportation is also dissuading immigrants from going to work or receiving public benefits, which experts say could risk economic repercussions across the state.
During Trump’s first administration, immigrants withdrew from federal food benefits due to fear of getting targeted by immigration enforcement or hurting their chance at becoming citizens. Chinchilla said she fears history will repeat itself. Already, Trump is asking states to share information about food voucher recipients, prompting a lawsuit from California and 18 other Democratic-led states.
“This fear was already there. I can only imagine how much more heightened it is now that we know it’s a reality that people’s information is really being shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” she said.
In Santa Rosa, a woman named Karen, who asked to be identified only by her first name because of her immigration status, lives with four of her six children in a two-bedroom apartment. The monthly rent is $2,299, according to the lease she shared with CalMatters. After ICE deported her husband — who earned the bulk of the family’s income as a gardener — back to Honduras in April, she said, she has scrambled to keep her family housed.
She contemplated asking the property manager to move the family to a smaller apartment. That would mean packing all five family members into a one-bedroom unit, but it would technically be affordable, she said. But Karen, who said she overstayed her visa from Honduras, worries that the mere request might provoke her landlord to initiate eviction proceedings. She said she’s also reticent to look for work herself, given her lack of legal status. Instead, she said, the family is scraping by on the income of her one working-age daughter and on money borrowed from family members while she considers her options.
There aren’t any obvious legal ones.
For renters like Karen who, as a result of a deportation, simply don’t have the funds to pay the rent, California’s expansive tenant protections don’t offer a remedy, even if she were willing to go to court, said McDonnell at Sonoma County Legal Aid.
“The reality is there’s no silver bullet or solution to a lack of money to pay the rent,” he said.
Some local governments, such as Los Angeles County and the cities of Long Beach and Los Angeles, are establishing donation-funded programs to help immigrants make rent and other payments. The state also has several immigrant assistance programs, and California lawmakers authorized a $25 million boost earlier this year to provide legal services to immigrants through nonprofit organizations.
But those dollars get spent down really fast, and “there’s always more need than there are dollars in the account,” Hall said.
In rural California, resources are scant and more scattered and hard to reach without a car, Juarez said.
“There’s evictions everywhere — there’s just less help to combat them in our rural communities and we could use all the help we can get,” she said.
CalMatters reporter Sergio Olmos contributed reporting.
This article was originally published by CalMatters.
