HUD’s Proposed Citizenship-Verification Rule Violates Privacy Act, EPIC Argues

On Tuesday, EPIC submitted comments urging the Department of Housing and Urban Development to rescind a proposed rule that would force all applicants and recipients of HUD assistance to verify their U.S. citizenship or eligible immigration status using DHS’s deeply flawed Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement (SAVE) system.

Currently, non-citizen members of mixed-citizenship-status families that receive HUD benefits can choose to not contend their eligibility. That way, the rest of the individual’s family could still be eligible to receive prorated assistance. For example, if a family has eligible children with U.S. citizenship but the parents are non-citizens, the children can still receive housing benefits. The “do not contend” policy has been in place for decades to avoid ripping apart mixed-citizenship-status families.

HUD’s proposed rule would do away with that practice, eliminating prorated assistance and forcing everyone in the household to go through eligibility screening via a faulty, error-ridden system for a household to receive assistance.

“At its core, the Proposed Rule presents a cartoonishly evil ‘Sophie’s Choice’ to some 80,000 people: either be homeless or tear your family apart,” EPIC’s comments read, referring to the 80% of all mixed-status families who HUD’s own analysis found likely to leave HUD housing to stay together in the face of such a rule.

EPIC’s comments focused on HUD’s plan to use the SAVE system to verify U.S. citizenship or eligible immigration status. EPIC argued that HUD’s Proposed Rule fails to account for the SAVE system’s documented inaccuracies, making it arbitrary and capricious, and violates the Privacy Act because it doesn’t mention any computer matching agreements that would authorize the agency to compare resident data with the overhauled SAVE system.

The overhauled SAVE system was built on unreliable citizenship data and has already caused real harm by inflicting widespread privacy violations and falsely identifying a significant number of eligible voters as non-citizens.

EPIC is part of a coalition of plaintiffs that sued the Trump-Vance administration for illegally repurposing SAVE, a benefits verification system, into a national citizenship database by pulling personal data from other government agencies.