a Better Bubble™
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The findings were stark. In one investigation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that a Texas state agency had steered $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and nearby communities of color after Hurricane Harvey inundated the region in 2017. In another investigation, HUD found that a homeowners association outside of Dallas had created rules to kick poor Black people out of their neighborhood.
The episodes amounted to egregious violations of civil rights laws, officials at the housing agency believed — enough to warrant litigation against the alleged culprits. That, at least, was the view during the presidency of Joe Biden. After the Trump administration took over, HUD quietly took steps that will likely kill both cases, according to three officials familiar with the matter.
Those steps were extremely unusual. Current and former HUD officials said they could not recall the housing agency ever pulling back cases of this magnitude in which the agency had found evidence of discrimination. That leaves the yearslong, high-profile investigations in a state of limbo, with no likely path for the government to advance them, current and former officials said. As a result, the alleged perpetrators of the discrimination could face no government penalties, and the alleged victims could receive no compensation.
“I just think that’s a doggone shame,” said Doris Brown, a Houston resident and a co-founder of a community group that, together with a housing nonprofit, filed the Harvey complaint. Brown saw 3 feet of water flood her home in a predominantly Black neighborhood that still shows damage from the storm. “We might’ve been able to get some more money to help the people that are still suffering,” she said.
On Jan. 15, HUD referred the Houston case to the Department of Justice, a necessary step to a federal lawsuit after the housing agency finds evidence of discrimination. Less than a month later, on Feb. 13, the agency rescinded its referral without public explanation. HUD did the same with the Dallas case not long after.
The development has alarmed some about a rollback of civil rights enforcement at the agency under President Donald Trump and HUD Secretary Scott Turner, who is from Texas. “The new administration is systematically dismantling the fair housing enforcement and education system,” said Sara Pratt, a former HUD official and an attorney for complainants in both Texas cases. “The message is: The federal government no longer takes housing discrimination seriously.”
HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett disagreed, saying there was precedent for the rescinded referrals, which were done to gather more facts and scrutinize the investigations. “We’re taking a fresh look at Biden Administration policies, regulations, and cases. These cases are no exception,” Lovett said in a statement. “HUD will uphold the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act as the department is strongly and wholeheartedly opposed to housing discrimination.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The Harvey case concerns a portion of a $4.3 billion grant that HUD gave to Texas after the hurricane inundated low-lying coastal areas, killing at least 89 people and causing more than $100 billion in damage. The money was meant to fund better drainage, flood control systems and other storm mitigation measures.
HUD sent the money to a state agency called the Texas General Land Office, which awarded the first $1 billion in funding to communities affected by Harvey through a grant competition. But the state agency excluded Houston and many of the most exposed coastal areas from eligibility for half of that money, according to HUD’s investigation. And, for the other half, it created award criteria that benefited rural areas at the expense of more populous applicants like Houston.
The result: Of that initial $1 billion, Houston — where nearly half of all homes were damaged by the hurricane — received nothing. Neither did Harris County, where Houston is located, or other coastal areas with large minority populations. Instead, the Texas agency, according to HUD, awarded a disproportionate amount of the aid to more rural, white areas that had suffered less damage in the hurricane. After an outcry, GLO asked HUD a few days later to send $750 million to Harris County, but HUD found that allocation still fell far short of the county’s mitigation needs. And none of that money went directly to Houston.
HUD launched an investigation into the competition in 2021, ultimately finding that GLO had discriminated on the basis of race and national origin, thereby violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and possibly the Fair Housing Act as well.
“GLO knowingly developed and operated a competition for the purpose of allocating funds to mitigate storm and flood risk that steered money away from urban Black and Hispanic communities that had the highest storm and flood risk into Whiter, more rural areas with less risk,” the agency wrote. “Despite awareness that its course of action would result in disparate harm for Black and Hispanic individuals, GLO still knowingly and disparately denied these communities critical mitigation funding.”
GLO has consistently disputed the allegations. It contends that many people of color benefited from its allocations. The Texas agency has also argued that the evidence in the case was weak, citing the fact that, in 2023, the Justice Department returned the case to HUD. At the time, the DOJ said it wanted HUD to investigate further. The housing agency then spent more than a year digging deeper into the facts and assembling more evidence before making its short-lived referral in January.
Asked about the rescinded referral, GLO spokesperson Brittany Eck told ProPublica: “Liberal political appointees and advocates spent years spinning false narratives without the facts to build a case. Four years of sensationalized, clickbait rhetoric without evidence is long enough.”
The other HUD case involved Providence Village, a largely white community north of Dallas of around 9,000 people. Purported concerns about crime and property values led the Providence Homeowners Association to adopt a rule in 2022 prohibiting property owners from renting to holders of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, through which HUD subsidizes the housing costs of poor, elderly and disabled people. There were at least 157 households in Providence Village supported by vouchers, nearly all of them Black families. After the HOA action, some of them began leaving.
The rule attracted national attention, leading the Texas Legislature to prohibit HOAs from banning Section 8 tenants. Undeterred, the Providence HOA adopted amended rules in 2024 that placed restrictions on rental properties, which HUD found would have a similar effect as the previous ban.
Throughout the HOA’s efforts, people peppered community social media groups with racist vitriol about voucher holders, describing them as “wild animals,” “ghetto poverty crime ridden mentality people” and “lazy entitled leeching TR@SH.” One person wrote that “they might just leave in a coroner’s wagon.”
The discord attracted a white nationalist group, which twice protested just outside Providence Village. “The federal government views safe White communities as a problem,” flyers distributed by the group read. “The Section 8 Housing Voucher is a tool used to bring diversity to these neighborhoods.”
In January, HUD formally accused the HOA, its board president, a property management company and one of its property managers of violating the Fair Housing Act. The respondents have disputed the allegation. The HOA has argued its rules were meant to protect property values, support well-maintained homes and address crime concerns. The property management company, FirstService Residential Texas, said it was not responsible for the actions of the HOA.
The HOA and FirstService did not respond to requests for comment. The property manager declined to comment. Mitch Little, a lawyer for the HOA board president, said: “HUD didn’t pursue this case because there’s nothing to pursue. The claims are baseless and unsubstantiated.”
The Providence Village and Houston cases stretched on for years. All it took was two terse emails to undo them. “HUD’s Office of General Counsel withdrew the referral of the above-captioned case to the Department of Justice,” HUD wrote to Pratt this month regarding one of the cases. “We have no further information at this time.” That was the entirety of the message; neither email explained the reasoning behind the decisions.
The cases may have fallen victim to a broader roll-back of civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department, where memos circulated in January ordering a freeze of civil rights cases and investigations.
The development is the latest sign that the Trump administration may dramatically curtail HUD’s housing discrimination work. The agency canceled 78 grants to local fair housing groups last month, sparking a lawsuit by some of them. HUD justified the cancellations by saying each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” (Pratt’s firm, Relman Colfax, is representing the plaintiffs in that suit.) And projections circulating within HUD last month indicated the agency’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity could see its staff cut by 76% under the new administration.
If HUD does not pursue the cases, the complainants could file their own lawsuits. But they may not soon forget the government’s about-face on the issue. “If there is a major flood in Houston, which there almost certainly will be, and people die, and homes get destroyed, the people who made this decision are in large part responsible,” said Ben Hirsch, a member of one of the groups that brought the Harvey complaint. “People will die because of this.”
Update, March 26, 2025: The day after this article was published, FirstService Residential Texas emailed ProPublica a statement saying the company denies the allegations in the case involving the Providence Village homeowners association and “remains committed to operating with fairness, integrity, and compliance with the law.”
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The Gregorio brothers had just begun their daybreak commute to work assembling wooden pallets in late January when federal officers in SUVs pulled them over in a Chicago suburb. Jhony and Bayron were in one car. A third brother, Marco, was traveling separately, in another car behind them.
After Jhony Gregorio handed over his identification, an officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened his door and pulled him out. Before long, more than a dozen other officers had arrived. Gregorio could see they had also stopped his brother Marco.
All three had been living and working in the United States without authorization after arriving from Guatemala. None had criminal records. But Bayron Gregorio had received a deportation order. Instead of detaining only him, authorities took all three brothers into custody.
Attempting to fulfill a campaign pledge to deport millions of people, the Trump administration has turned to tactics that have prompted a flurry of court challenges across the country and created an atmosphere of fear. Each week has brought a new example, as agents have detained immigrants and shuttled them out of the country to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Panama; and, most recently, a dangerous prison in El Salvador without hearings, much less opportunities to communicate with lawyers and relatives.
But in Chicago and other cities, there are quieter operations underway that raise similar legal questions as federal agents pick up people in ones, twos and threes.
Lawyers for Jhony and Marco Gregorio are arguing that their arrests were among at least 22 that violated a court settlement prohibiting authorities from detaining undocumented people they coincidentally encounter while serving warrants for others. So-called collateral detentions were the subject of a 2022 class-action settlement that set out stricter parameters for how agents should handle these situations, including new restrictions on warrantless arrests.
Attorneys for the Trump administration have denied allegations that the arrests occurred in violation of that agreement, called Nava, after one of the original plaintiffs. Specifically, administration lawyers argued the arrests were not warrantless, according to court records.
Under the Nava settlement, ICE agents are required to adhere to strict guidelines to make warrantless arrests, including establishing that someone will attempt to flee instead of participating in court proceedings.
“The administration’s approach to immigration enforcement and how it has responded to court orders was bound to be the canary in the coal mine of this administration’s overall approach to our democracy and the rule of law,” said Mark Fleming, associate director of litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, which is representing Jhony and Marco Gregorio and other detainees as the center goes to court alleging Nava settlement violations.
Observers and advocates say they don’t expect the White House to let up on its crackdown or adjust its tactics because of any legal pushback.
“I don’t think they back down,” said Kathleen Arnold, DePaul University professor of refugee and forced migration studies. “They assumed that there weren’t due process roadblocks that could prevent ICE from doing exactly what they want.”
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment.
During the initial roundups in January, the administration made it clear that collateral arrests were part of a strategy for enforcement in Chicago and other sanctuary cities where local law enforcement declines to assist in migrant arrests. “There’s going to be more collateral arrests in sanctuary cities because they forced us to go into the community and find the guy we’re looking for,” White House border czar Tom Homan told reporters in a televised interview.
The stricter arrest guidelines from Nava were adopted as national policy under the Biden administration, attorneys for the plaintiffs said, but were rescinded after Trump entered office in January. The agreement remains in effect in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin, all states covered by the Chicago ICE office, the attorneys said. It’s set to expire in May.
Attorneys for National Immigrant Justice Center and ACLU of Illinois this month went to court in Chicago citing the Nava settlement and seeking an order that the federal government stop creating warrants in the field, reimburse their clients for bond costs and provide weekly reports of any warrantless arrests. They also are asking for the release of the two clients identified in the suit who are still being held.
In making the argument that ICE and Homeland Security are violating the Nava settlement, attorneys for the two Gregorio brothers said Jhony and Marco clearly were not flight risks. They both have been living in the U.S. for over a decade and have ties to the Chicago area and suburban Maywood, where they live. Jhony Gregorio is married and has a child who was born in the U.S.
The only warrants for them, the attorneys said, were written up after they were detained.
“The creation of a warrant after the fact does not cure the warrantless nature of these incidents,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote, “and the Settlement’s training material specifically forbid reliance on post hoc administrative warrants to avoid warrantless arrest requirements.”
In the end, the two brothers and most of the other migrants cited in the lawsuit were released and able to remain in the United States, at least for now. Two of the 22 still are in ICE custody, and one has been deported, lawyers for the two advocacy groups said.
Jhony and Marco Gregorio now face an immigration case that could see them removed from the United States. Attorneys for the pair are not claiming that ICE’s arrest of their brother, Bayron, was unwarranted, and he is not a party in the lawsuit. It is unclear if he’s been deported.
Among those released is Julio Noriega, a 54-year-old Chicago man. He was handing out resumes to local businesses in search of work when he was approached by ICE officers in January, according to his witness declaration in the latest Nava filings.
Before he had a chance to explain, Noriega said, the officers placed him in handcuffs and moved him into a van. It wasn’t until after he’d already been taken to an ICE processing center and waited several hours that officers checked his wallet and realized he is a U.S. citizen.
Abel Orozco-Ortega, 47, who is also named in the new Nava filings, was arrested in January, too. He’d just returned home from buying breakfast for his family when officers detained him outside his house in Lyons, a suburb of Chicago where he’s lived with his family for the last 15 years.
Federal agents were looking for Orozco-Ortega’s son. They didn’t find him but took Orozco-Ortega into custody. Orozco-Ortega said in his statement that he has no criminal history. Filings in his case do not detail why agents were looking for his son. Orozco-Ortega has been residing in the U.S. without authorization.
His wife, Yolanda, said he is no criminal and pleaded for his release. “He doesn’t have any vices, he doesn’t do drugs, he goes to church,” she said speaking through an interpreter at a recent press conference. “Is it a crime to get up early every day for work to support your family? I just don’t know.”
Fleming said the center is continuing to compile examples of arrests that the firm believes show warrantless arrests.
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