❓WHAT HAPPENED: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent credited President Donald J. Trump’s mass deportation agenda for helping bring down apartment rents across the U.S.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner, and President Trump.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Comments were made on Tuesday, December 16, 2025.
💬KEY QUOTE: “Rents are down. You know the story that the Biden administration doesn’t want to talk about: The mass unfettered immigration that pushed up rents, especially for working Americans.” – Scott Bessent
🎯IMPACT: The decline in the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. has lessened competition in the rental market, causing housing costs to begin to decline for working Americans.
President Donald J. Trump’s mass deportation of illegal immigrants is beginning to have an impact on housing rents, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Data from November shows that apartment rents fell 1.1 percent compared to the previous year, and 5.2 percent compared to November 2022.
“Rents are down. You know the story that the Biden administration doesn’t want to talk about: The mass unfettered immigration that pushed up rents, especially for working Americans,” Bessent said on Tuesday. He continued: “There’s a recent study out from the Wharton School that shows every one percent increase in population, rents went up one percent. So, by enforcing the border, sending home more than two million illegals, we’re now seeing… rents coming down substantially.”
“I think that will continue for the rest of the year. We brought interest rates down, so we brought mortgage rates down, and I think everything else will follow that,” the Treasury Secretary added. Meanwhile, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner recently noted that the surge in housing prices, which occurred as former President Joe Biden imported millions of illegal immigrants to the United States, shows “it’s not a coincidence, it’s a correlation.”
The National Pulse previously reported that as the impacts of the Biden government’s immigration and border policies began to take hold in early 2024, New York City saw rental costs skyrocket. In February 2024, there was an 18 percent surge in one-bedroom rentals in New York City, which pushed the average price to a record high of $4,200. Even in Jersey City, situated across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the median rent cost rose 5.4 percent to $3,140.
Earlier this month, HUD found that mass immigration has a specific detrimental impact on lower-income Americans who earn too much to qualify for public housing assistance. “One key cause of elevated worst-case needs is immigration. Between 2021 and 2024, the foreign-born population of the United States increased by more than six million—the largest such increase over such a short period in American history,” the HUD investigation stated, adding: “This immigration-driven increase in households has contributed to a significant increase in housing demand, thus driving up housing prices. In fact, in some markets, immigration has accounted for nearly all of the increase in housing demand in recent years.”
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