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A group of whistleblowers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) alleges that the agency is abdicating its duty to enforce federal civil rights and fair housing laws.
On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) sent a letter to Brian Harrison, the acting inspector general for HUD, urging him to investigate the allegations.
“Right now, if you’re a mom protecting your kids from living with an abusive father, or if you’re getting denied a mortgage because of the color of your skin, you have civil rights protection under U.S. law,” Warren said in a video posted to X on Monday.
She continued: “But the Trump administration has been systematically destroying these federal protections for renters and homeowners, and now new internal documents shared with my office from whistleblowers inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development show the extent of the Trump administration’s attack on civil rights and show how the administration appears to be ignoring the law.”
Warren’s letter to Harrison quotes extensively from a “Letter by Named and Anonymous OFH [Office of Fair Housing] Attorneys” sent to the senator.
HUD leadership, they wrote, has “placed the Department on an unalterable course towards violating its statutory and regulatory obligations to safeguard the equal distribution of federal funds, to combat housing discrimination in the public and private sectors, and to protect the lives of countless survivors of domestic violence.”
The attorneys allege that HUD staff were told that “fair housing was ‘not a priority’ of the administration, that less civil rights work would be performed under this administration, and that there was an ‘optics problem’ with [OFH] being as large as it was,” as per Warren’s letter.
Warren condemned the idea that “optics” should have an effect on the enforcement of federal civil rights laws.
“Imagine thinking that defending Black families from being denied a mortgage because they’re Black, or protecting a mom and her kids from living with an abusive father is a quote, optics problem,” Warren said in the video. “Imagine thinking that it’s an optics problem to help the dad with a bad knee whose landlord refuses to install a handrail on the stairs.”
A New York Times investigation, published on Monday, found that “internal communications, memos and other documents …. show efforts by the Trump administration to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark civil rights law that has prohibited discrimination in housing for nearly six decades.”
The Times reports that since Trump’s second presidential term began, “hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and some settlements revoked, even when accusations of discrimination had been substantiated.”
In addition to enforcing anti-discrimination laws, HUD is tasked with implementing the housing provisions in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA.)
“In its 2022 reauthorization of VAWA, Congress expanded HUD’s role in implementing VAWA, and OFH became ‘instrumental in ensuring that survivors [of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking, and/or human trafficking] are provided with emergency transfers to safe housing and that they are not retraumatized by being evicted because of an assault,’” Warren wrote.
But HUD leadership has reassigned 75 percent of the VAWA team, including its supervisors, which would leave just two attorneys in the unit, according to the whistleblowers.
“These are life and death requests,” HUD attorney Paul Osadebe told the Times. “These women are legitimately in mortal danger, and often without the government stepping in, nothing will be done.”
The Times reports that Osadebe and other HUD attorneys filed a federal lawsuit on Monday seeking to halt their reassignments.
“This is a deliberate plan, and it’s about shutting down fair housing,” said Osadebe, who is also an organizer with the Federal Unionists Network, a coalition of federal workers fighting the Trump administration’s mass layoffs and budget cuts.
Before Trump took office, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing employed 31 people, according to Warren’s letter. There are now just 11 staff members, including six staff attorneys. The whistleblowers allege that HUD officials told OFH attorneys “they could go to almost any other office [within the agency]; they must simply abandon fair housing work,” according to Warren’s letter.
“The Trump administration is firing and reassigning as many people from the Civil Rights Office as they possibly can, and why?” the senator said in the video posted on X. “To make it impossible for the few staff that remain to actually do their jobs and help people the way the law says.”
Before becoming president, Donald Trump was a real estate developer and property owner. In the 1970s, the Department of Justice sued Trump and his father for refusing to rent to prospective Black tenants in violation of the Fair Housing Act. Trump hired Roy Cohn, a virulent anti-communist, to defend him. The Trumps eventually settled the case, but the Justice Department later accused them of violating the terms of the settlement.
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