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A woman of six in Santa Rosa claims she is having trouble making her rent payments since her husband was deported, but she is afraid of being evicted if she even asks her landlord to let her move into a smaller apartment.
An attorney for a Latino family in Los Angeles said that they were likely to be arrested by immigration officials before the matter could proceed to trial after the family sued their landlord and a real estate agent for wrongful eviction.
A landlord in Oakland has questioned renters about their legal status in an attempt to evict them.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has detained large groups of family breadwinners throughout the state, leaving their families unable to pay rent while they mourn the loss of their loved ones. However, the effects of those activities go beyond that: Many immigrants have been deterred from asserting their rights as tenants simply by the threat of deportation.
Rents in California are among the highest in the nation, making it difficult enough to be a renter there. Illegal immigrants sometimes labor in low-paying jobs with inadequate benefits and have no solid credit history. In addition to paying more for the home they do acquire, they already have a harder time finding accommodation, are more likely to live in cramped quarters, and may be more likely to be evicted.
According to housing rights lawyers and academics, President Donald Trump’s stepped-up immigration crackdown puts those renters at greater risk of eviction and exploitation, which might push more immigrants into homelessness or overcrowding or even cause some to leave the country voluntarily.
According to David Hall, co-directing tenants’ rights attorney with Centro Legal de La Raza, a nonprofit legal aid organization in Oakland, the fear of landlord reprisals has resulted in what advocates call a chilling effect on immigrant renters, significantly undermining California’s robust tenant protection laws.
Even if you have the greatest protective laws in the world, he added, if people are scared to enforce them, it’s as if they don’t exist.
Immigrants already face higher housing barriers
locating a home. Paying the rent. preventing eviction. Californian immigrant renters already face more obstacles at every stage of negotiating the state’s housing market than their peers who were born in the United States.
Compared to U.S. citizens, undocumented immigrant tenants have considerably less access to public services. According to Thai V. Le, a research scientist at the USC Equity Research Institute, those who are staying in the nation illegally have a lower rate of uptake even when benefits or services are accessible because they are unaware of them or are afraid to use them.
Therefore, those immigrants are more likely to be rent-burdened, which is defined by experts as paying rent that exceeds 30% of a household’s income. According to the USC Equity Research Institute’s California Immigrant Data Portal, two-thirds of undocumented renters in the state were rent-burdened as of 2021, compared to 57% of all immigrant renters and 53% of their peers who were born in the United States.
renters without legal immigration status are more likely than others to pack themselves into cramped homes rented by friends or family and are less likely to exercise their rights as renters once they find a place to rent. According to Melissa Chinchilla, a researcher with the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute, such arrangements frequently expose tenants to poor living conditions, deny them legal protections because their name is not on the lease, and increase their risk of homelessness should even one of their roommates lose their job.
According to a June 2025 study by the University of California San Francisco, 70% of homeless foreign-born Latinos in California resided in homes for which they did not have a lease, compared to 46% of Latinos born in the United States.
Additionally, it is more difficult for undocumented immigrants to find new housing when they become homeless, according to Chinchilla.
According to her, they might not be able to provide a credit check. They might receive payment in cash. Therefore, they might not have that income history.
Do they want to create waves?
Since Trump has returned to the White House with greater vigor and a focus on aggressive, indiscriminate immigration enforcement, all of those anxieties and obstacles have been amplified.
Under his leadership, ICE will soon receive previously unheard-of levels of financing after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed to share individuals’ personal data with the agency. The livelihood of families who depend on public benefits like early childhood education, health care, and housing programs is at risk due to proposed limitations to immigrants’ access to these programs.
According to Cynthia Moreno, a senior data analyst at the Equity Research Institute, people’s worst worries are regrettably coming true.
According to Marie Claire Tran-Leung, an attorney at the National Housing Law Project, a tenant rights advocacy group, the Trump administration’s well reported deportation campaign makes the situation even more precarious for those who are already at a disadvantage in the landlord-tenant relationship.
Tenant protection regulations in California are among of the most robust in the country. They include stringent terms and conditions when a landlord moves to evict a tenant, a statewide maximum on the amount of rent increases that landlords are permitted to make annually, and restrictions on application fees and security deposits. Tenants, regardless of their immigration status, are theoretically entitled to those rights.
It is illegal for landlords to inquire about or reveal a tenant’s immigration status to anybody, including federal immigration officers, according to a 2018 state law. Additionally, it is against the law for landlords to intimidate or harass tenants because of their immigration status.
However, not all tenants know their rights or are prepared to use them.
According to Hall, even if a tenant has an excellent landlord, they may be discouraged or disinclined to exercise their rights if they are always concerned that the landlord would put them on ICE’s radar.
According to Daniela Juarez, a certified legal aid attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance, immigrants in the Central Valley are less likely to attend tenants’ rights workshops because they are afraid of being singled out by ICE at major gatherings.
For fear of being singled out, organizations have ceased promoting their Know Your Rights Workshops and are now relying solely on word-of-mouth. In order to protect their clients, others are opting to conduct courses exclusively by appointment, she noted in an email. All of them are concerned that things will only get worse because they have noticed a chilling impact in services overall.
Because immigration officers frequently detain people at courthouses across the nation, families are also reluctant to appear in court for housing-related matters. According to Patrick McDonnell, a housing lawyer with Sonoma County Legal Aid, word of the arrest outside the Sonoma County Probation office in March spread throughout the immigrant community in Santa Rosa.
According to McDonnell, many of our clients are essentially prepared to accept a deal that is not the greatest one we could offer them in order to avoid having to appear in person at a courthouse.
Even when he and his colleagues think a landlord’s claims are false or legally insufficient, that has been the case, he said. However, that individual will have to go since we are aware that we do not have a client that we can take to court.
And the terror doesn’t end there: requesting a repair. Formally lodging a grievance. participating in workshops on housing rights. looking for a regular accommodation. Such everyday encounters have grown more delicate for undocumented immigrants, families with mixed immigration status, and anybody else who may otherwise be worried about attracting the notice of immigration enforcement officials.
According to Juarez, people are actually required to obtain a risk assessment. Do they wish to make a splash? Do I wish to annoy my landlord?
No silver bullet to financial hardships
Additionally, immigrants are being discouraged from working or using public assistance due to fear of deportation, which experts warn could have negative economic effects throughout the state.
Because they were afraid of being singled out by immigration officials or having their chances of becoming citizens harmed, immigrants stopped receiving federal food handouts during Trump’s first presidency. According to Chinchilla, she worries that history will happen again. California and 18 other Democratic-led states have already filed a lawsuit against Trump for requesting that states share information about food voucher recipients.
There was already this fear. Now that we know it’s a reality that people’s information is actually shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I can only imagine how much more elevated it is,” she said.
A mother named Karen, who requested to be identified solely by her first name due to her immigration status, resides in a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Rosa with four of her six children. The agreement she shared with CalMatters states that the rent is $2,299 per month. She claimed that she had rushed to keep her family housed since ICE deported her husband, who provided the majority of the family’s income as a gardener, back to Honduras in April.
She considered requesting a smaller apartment for the family from the property manager. According to her, it would theoretically be economical even though it would require all five family members to live in a one-bedroom apartment. However, Karen, who claimed to have overstayed her Honduran visa, is concerned that the request alone could prompt her landlord to start the eviction process. She claimed that because of her lack of legal status, she is also reluctant to look for job on her own. Instead, she said that while she weighs her choices, the family is making ends meet with the help of her one working-age daughter’s wages and loans from relatives.
No clear-cut legal ones exist.
Even if Karen were willing to go to court, California’s extensive tenant rights would not provide a remedy for renters like her who, due to a deportation, simply do not have the money to pay the rent, according to McDonnell of 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 asLos Angeles Countyand the cities ofLong BeachandLos Angeles, are establishing donation-funded programs to help immigrants make rent and other payments. The state also has severalimmigrant 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.
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