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. 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.
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