DHS Says ICE Deportations Are Pushing Down Rent. Other Factors Are at Play - Newsweek

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that the Trump administration’s mass deportations of undocumented migrants has lowered rents in several Sun Belt cities, including Austin, Nashville and Phoenix.

“DHS is reducing your rent, especially in states that cooperate with [the Immigration and Custom Enforcement] ICE,” the department wrote in a social media post on X.

“Texas accounted for about a quarter of ICE arrests in July and posted the country’s sharpest rent drops, with San Antonio down 4.8 percent, Austin 4.3 percent, Dallas and Houston about 3 percent. Miami’s average rent is down 2.6 percent. Phoenix is down 4.2 percent. Atlanta is down 3.2 percent. Nashville is down 5.3 percent. New Orleans is down 8 percent,” it added.

DHS did not identify the source or methodology for the rent figures cited in its post. The percentages do not appear to correspond with several major publicly available rental indexes.

The post points at unspecified “research” showing that “illegal-worker inflows push rents and home prices up,” adding that “that inflow has been reversed in the states running the hardest interior enforcement.”

The research mentioned by the department is likely to be a working paper released by economists Daniel J. Wilson of the San Francisco Fed and Xiaoqing Zhou of the Dallas Fed earlier this year, which found that a surge in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden is what brought U.S. housing costs through the roof. The study’s conclusions were contested by other housing experts and economists, who pointed out at “inherent problems” with the authors’ methodology, including ignoring the impact of domestic migration on home price growth.

Nonetheless, the DHS concluded in its social media post: “Want lower cost of living: support mass deportations.”

While the administration wanted to highlight an alleged causal link between states willing to cooperate with ICE agents and lower rent, the metropolitan areas mentioned by the department were already undergoing a significant price correction due to a major new apartment and multifamily construction boom.

Newsweek contacted DHS for comment by email on Sunday.

Four of the metros where rent has fallen over the past year are in Texas, which has built more new apartment and multifamily housing than any other state since the pandemic in response to a surge in domestic migration between 2020 and 2022.

These included Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio—all metros which were cited in an August 2025 study by RentCafe listing the top 20 cities for new apartment construction last year.

Dallas and Austin ranked second and third after New York City with 28,958 and 26,715 new units set to be completed by the end of the year, respectively. Phoenix, another city mentioned by DHS, was fourth with 21,188 units, while Atlanta followed in fifth place with 17,512. Miami was seventh with 15,666, Nashville was 14th with 9,810. New Orleans did not feature in the top 20.

All this inventory, approved during the surge in population and demand, flooded the market at a time when demand had already shrunk significantly under the pressure of higher prices and return-to-office orders from employers on the West and Northeast coasts.

The increased competition among landlords for a smaller pool of renters has led to a stark correction from peak pricing during the pandemic, and rent has been falling and continues sliding down in all of the metros cited above. In Austin, according to Zillow, the average rent is now $1,990, down $10 from a year earlier. In Dallas, it is $1,950, down $45 from a year earlier. In Houston, it is $1,900, unchanged from a year earlier. In San Antonio, it is $1,600, down $80 year-over-year.

In Miami, which remains a fairly expensive city for both renters and homebuyers, rent is $3,150, down $10 from a year earlier. In Phoenix, it is $1,825, down $70 year-over-year. In Atlanta, the average rent is $2,100, unchanged from a year earlier. In Nashville, it is $2,200, down $50 from a year earlier. In New Orleans, it is $1,650, down by a staggering $100 year-over-year, according to Zillow.

DHS did not provide metro-level figures showing how many renters had left Austin, Dallas, Houston or the other cities as a result of immigration enforcement, nor did it specify how much of each city’s rent decline can be attributed to deportations rather than other changes in housing supply and demand.

Crucially, the metros cited by DHS are also not the only ones now experiencing lower rent as a result of an oversupply of new housing units.

The same has been happening in Las Vegas, Nevada, and San Diego, California, a city in a purple state and another one in a blue state. In Las Vegas, the average rent is now $1,950, unchanged from last year, according to Zillow. In San Diego, it is $3,100, down $8 year-over-year.

Rent declines have not been confined to the Sun Belt, though there is where they have been most significant. Nationally, median asking rents for studios through two-bedroom properties across the 50 largest U.S. metro areas fell year-over-year for the 37th consecutive month in August, according to Realtor.com, driven by the combination of an influx of new apartments and slower rental demand, particularly in the South and West.

Lowering the cost of housing through mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. was one of President Donald Trump’s campaign promises in 2024. But experts have been skeptical about whether this could have the positive impact the president promised.

The Trump administration has deported more than 605,000 illegal aliens, while also triggering an additional 1.9 million self-deportations since January 2025, according to the White House.

From a housing-market perspective, large-scale deportations should “help free up some housing,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, said in an assessment of the policy earlier this year.

But any benefit gained from deporting masses of undocumented migrants could be undermined by the dire conditions it would leave the homebuilding workforce in. The U.S. construction industry employs nearly 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, according to reports based on U.S. Census data and labor surveys cited by the American Business Immigration Coalition. The Urban Institute reported last year that immigrants constituted more than 23 percent of U.S. construction workers in 2023 and estimated roughly half were undocumented.

“Immigrants play a significant role in construction, and reducing labor supply tends to raise building costs and slow new home production,” Fairweather said.

Restricting immigration carries the risk of making it “more difficult for companies to hire workers in the near-term, and that impact is likely to be acutely felt by a construction industry that employs many foreign-born workers,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com chief economist, previously told Newsweek.

Similarly, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) has argued that fewer available workers can delay construction, raise labor costs and ultimately put upward pressure on home prices. A July 2025 Reuters investigation found that a $20 million recreation center project near Mobile, Alabama, went from being on schedule to facing about a three-week delay after an ICE raid in Florida.

The superintendent said roughly half of his workforce stopped showing up, because workers feared similar raids. Reuters interviewed 14 people in construction and reported that they described delays, cost overruns and worsening labor shortages.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Cristina Diciu.