As immigration enforcement has increased across Texas, the Department of Homeland Security is pointing to declining rents in several major Texas cities as evidence that the Trump administration’s deportation efforts are helping ease housing costs.
In September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said that ICE operations in Texas accounted for about a quarter of the agency’s arrests in July. The department also pointed to declining rental prices in several major Texas cities, including a reported 3% decrease in Dallas, a 4.8% decrease in San Antonio and a 4.3% decrease in Austin.
Other housing data show that Dallas’ rental market has softened, although the decline has been less pronounced than the figures cited by DHS. Zillow reported that the typical asking rent in Dallas was $1,667 in July 2026, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, while 65.6% of Dallas rental listings offered a concession. Concessions can include incentives such as a free month of rent, waived fees or other move-in discounts.
In June, Zillow reported that the typical Dallas rent was $1,673, unchanged from the previous year, while 64.6% of rental listings offered concessions. The typical Dallas home value was $365,048, down 2.5% from a year earlier.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has also found a connection between unauthorized immigration and housing costs, although its research examined a period that largely predates President Donald Trump’s second term.
A March 2026 working paper by Daniel J. Wilson and Xiaoqing Zhou examined the effects of the surge in unauthorized immigration between early 2021 and early 2024. The researchers found that unauthorized immigrant worker flows increased local employment approximately one-for-one and raised local home prices and rents without a corresponding increase in housing supply.
The researchers estimated that unauthorized immigration accounted for roughly 30% of home-price growth and about 20% of rent growth in the average metropolitan market during the period studied. The study also found that unauthorized immigrant worker flows accounted for roughly 30% of employment growth in the average local labor market.
The researchers cautioned that their findings do not mean unauthorized immigration was responsible for all housing inflation. Instead, the study found that increased immigration created additional housing demand at a time when housing supply was relatively slow to respond.
The study does not examine whether the increase in deportations under the Trump administration caused rents to fall after January 2025. Instead, it provides evidence that changes in immigration levels can affect housing demand and, consequently, home prices and rents.
Data from the Congressional Budget Office also show the scale of the immigration increase during the period studied by the Dallas Fed. CBO estimates that net immigration of people in its “other foreign national” category totaled 830,000 in 2021, 2 million in 2022, 2.4 million in 2023 and 1.3 million in 2024.
The CBO category is broader than people who are unlawfully present in the United States. It includes people who entered the country without lawful status as well as some people who were legally admitted temporarily but later remained after their status expired.
The Dallas Fed has reported that net unauthorized immigration began declining rapidly in mid-2024 and turned negative in February 2025. That decline coincided with the broader changes in immigration policy and enforcement that followed Trump’s return to office.
As immigration levels have declined and immigration enforcement has increased, the pressure that a growing population places on housing demand has also eased. While factors such as increased apartment construction and broader market conditions have contributed to slower rent growth, the Dallas Fed’s research shows that immigration can have a measurable effect on housing costs when demand grows faster than the supply of available homes.
For Dallas renters, the combination of declining immigration, increased enforcement and a growing supply of apartments has coincided with a cooling rental market. While the available data do not establish that deportations alone caused rents to fall, the trend suggests that a reduction in immigration-driven housing demand can contribute to easing rental costs when combined with increased housing supply.
