Illegal Immigrants Organize to Fight HUD Rules Calling for Their Eviction

Maria De Jesus Acosta says she doesn’t have much money, but she managed to give $1 to a small boy passing around a plastic bag Saturday afternoon at the San Fernando Gardens housing project in Pacoima.

Acosta, 75, was among about three dozen illegal immigrants who gathered in the parish hall at Guardian Angel Catholic Church in the project on Lehigh Avenue to learn about la regla, a set of new rules from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development calling for the eviction of illegal immigrants such as Acosta from federally subsidized housing. Acosta’s donation was to be used to fight the new regulation.

“I’ll be ruined completely if we don’t have these accommodations that they are trying to take away,” said Acosta, a native of Zacatecas, Mexico. Speaking through an interpreter, she said she has lived for five years with her 73-year-old sister in a two-bedroom, $125-a-month apartment in the Van Nuys Pierce Park Apartments project in Pacoima. “We’re poor. I don’t know what we will do if we are told to move,” she said.

Saturday’s meeting, sponsored by several San Fernando Valley and East Los Angeles social service and church groups, was aimed at informing residents of housing projects about the new rules and galvanizing opposition to them.

Organizers hope lawmakers will rescind the regulations or, at least, make them inapplicable to those already living in federally subsidized housing, said Sister Becky Gaba, director of a Pacoima social service agency called Meet Each Need With Dignity, or MEND.

Gaba said the ruling will devastate hundreds of families.

“We’re going to see a lot more people out on the streets, a lot more families living in one dwelling, . . . people forced to move their whole family out of an apartment into a bedroom for $200 or $250 a month or renting a garage for $250 to $300 a month without running water or bathrooms,” she said.

“Right now, there is a lot of fear because there’s such a housing shortage around here as it is,” Gaba said. “They don’t know where they’re going to go,” she said.

Most tenants of the housing projects were aware of the new regulations before Saturday’s meeting, Gaba said. Leaflets explaining the crackdown have been distributed door-to-door by members of her group. But Gaba and others passed around stacks of postcards for tenants to sign, to be delivered to legislators, and asked those present to circulate petitions and newsletters.

“We have to unite and fight this, because if they get away with it here, they’ll get away with it anywhere,” Margaret Salazar of the Neighborhood Action Committee said in Spanish. Her words were met with hearty applause.

“I am praying to God that the law does not pass,” said one woman, who said she is an unmarried, unemployed mother of children aged 6 and 1. The woman, who did not give her name, said through a translator that she has been living in a two-bedroom, $102-a-month apartment at San Fernando Gardens for about three months. She said that earlier she had been paying $200 for a studio apartment that she shared with her two children and a girlfriend.

Under the rules, announced March 31 and scheduled to take effect July 30, applicants for federally subsidized housing will be required to provide proof of their citizenship or their legal immigrant status.

Beginning Oct. 27, those already living in federal housing must show such proof at their annual subsidy evaluations. Those who cannot produce documents will be forced to pay much higher fair-market rents for their units. If they cannot do so, they probably will be evicted, HUD officials have said.

Organizers of Saturday’s event said they do not know how many San Fernando Valley tenants may be affected by the new regulations.

In Pacoima, the San Fernando Gardens has 448 apartments. The nearby Pierce Park on Van Nuys Boulevard has 430 units. A HUD spokesman has said there are about 150,000 federally subsidized units in Los Angeles County, but he was uncertain of the number in the Valley.

According to HUD, the new rules “are intended to reserve scarce housing assistance resources for persons with the most legitimate claim--namely, citizens and other persons lawfully present in the United States.”

In U.S. Since 1963

Maria Alvarado, 39, said she and her husband, Antonio, do not know what they will do if they are forced to leave San Fernando Gardens, where they live with their seven children aged 7 months to 18 years. They are from Jalisco, Mexico, and have been in the United States since 1963.

The Alvarados pay $81 a month for a four-bedroom apartment and have lived in the project for 11 years, Maria Alvarado said.

The rent was $250 a month when Antonio was working as a welder, but he was fired after nine years and has been unable to find a job since, Maria said. She said through a translator that neither she nor the older children work and added that the family may have to return to Mexico.

She said she would not like to do that because she “lives comfortably here.”

Another alternative, Alvarado said, is that “the older kids will have to leave school and start working.” She said, “I’ve been thinking day and night about it. What am I going to do?”

Critics say the policy could have a devastating effect on families in which one spouse is a registered alien and the other is not. A HUD attorney said the rules will apply to illegal alien parents whose children were born in the United States. All members of a family must be legal residents to qualify for federal housing subsidies, the attorney said.

Gaba said she fears that the new law will push up housing prices. Additionally, she said, many places illegally refuse to rent to people with children.

Organizers have scheduled another meeting for Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at MEND’s offices, Gaba said.