In Santa Rosa, a mother of six children says she’s struggling to pay the rent following her husband’s deportation—but fears eviction from her landlord if she even requests to move into a smaller place.

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.

Housing Barriers

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 put 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.” 

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.

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.

“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,” Daniela Juarez, a registered legal aid attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance, 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 McDonell, a housing attorney with Sonoma County Legal Aid.

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. 

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 Cal Matters. 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 McDonell 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.

Sergio Olmos contributed reporting.