13
COVID-19 crisis. Some $22 billion
remains unspent, and could theoreti-
cally be used to help people facing
displacement from rent spikes, but
it’s unclear exactly how. “We actually
have to fix this problem in the long
run,” says Ann Oliva of the
Center on Budget and Pol-
icy Priorities.
Some other federal
funds could help: in ad-
dition to the $47 billion
in rental assistance, Con-
gress allocated $350 bil-
lion to facilitate “state
and local fiscal recovery”
projects. Such projects
can include offering haz-
ard pay to essential work-
ers or building new infrastructure.
Oliva says governments could jump
on that funding to help renters with
price hikes in the short term, and to
help address the underlying mismatch
between housing supply and demand
down the road.
Unfortunately, if there’s a light at
the end of the tunnel, it’s too far away
to see for deGraffenreid and others in
the same situation now. At the rate of
current housing construction, peo-
ple all over the country will likely see
rents increase again next year.
—Abby VesoulisIMMIGRATION
Lawsuit filedover trackingimmigrants
More thAn 216,000 people with
pending cases before U.S. immigra-
tion courts have been placed in a fed-
eral government tracking program,
according to federal data released
April 14.
Since President Joe Biden took of-
fice, the number of immigrants in
the Alternatives to Detention (ATD)
program has more than doubled, re-
fecting the Administration’s embrace
of new surveillance technology as a
tool to limit reliance on government-
funded detention centers.
While immigrant advocates haveper Zumper, a rental platform. Na-
tionwide, from March 2021 to
March 2022, rent for a one bedroom
rose an average of 12%.
For millions, these hikes are exis-
tential. If you can’t afford your new
lease, but you also can’t afford to
pony up for moving expenses, what
happens? This is not a short-term,
pandemic- related problem, experts
say. It’s born of a deep disconnect be-
tween supply and demand.
The elephant in the room is a lack
of new housing. Since 2008, new
construction has moved at a snail’s
pace, and pandemic- related supply-
chain problems and labor shortages
have made things worse. At the same
time, demand has spiked as remote-
work policies pushed millions of
renters to towns and small cities,
where would-be buyers were iced out
of the housing market: home prices
rose 17% last year alone. To meet the
current demand for affordable homes,
builders would have to construct
4.6 million new apartments by 2030,
according to the National Apartment
Association.
Congress, meanwhile, allocated
nearly $47 billion from 2020 to 2021
to stave off evictions during the
‘How are
people’s
most
personal
data being
used?’
—JACINTA GONZALEZ,
MIJENTElong called on U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) to re-
duce or end the use of immigrant
detention centers, they say the ATD
program raises a fresh set of concerns
about immigrants’ privacy and civil
rights. On April 14, three
immigrant advocacy or-
ganizations—Just Fu-
tures Law, Mijente, and
Community Justice Ex-
change—filed a lawsuit
against ICE, calling on
the agency to provide in-
formation showing what
data is being collected on
individuals enrolled in
the ATD program, who
are increasingly moni-
tored through a phone app called
SmartLINK , which combines GPS
with voice and facial recognition.
As the number of immigrants
monitored under ATD has ticked
up, the number in ICE detention
centers has declined. But it’s not a
direct one-to-one correlation, says
Austin Kocher, assistant professor and
researcher at Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse, a research
organization at Syracuse University.
The number of immigrants in ATD
has expanded, while the number
of people in immigrant detention
facilities has fuctuated, he says.
“[ATD] is more of a mechanism
for [ICE] to expand their ability to
monitor immigrants who are in the
country,” Kocher says.
An ICE spokesperson would not
comment on the new litigation but
said the agency is committed to pro-
tecting privacy rights and the civil
rights and liberties of those in the
ATD program.
For the immigrant advocates who
have filed suit against ICE, the bigger
issue is how immigrants’ data is being
harvested and utilized. “We’re gonna
continue to be part of this lawsuit
until we can get some basic informa-
tion to understand how people’s most
personal data, their biometric infor-
mation, is being used by private com-
panies and the government in this mo-
ment,” says Jacinta Gonzalez, senior
campaign director at Mijente.
—JAsMine AGuilerA