Hurricane Harvey took everything from Vanessa: furniture, beds, her car. Even the walls of her Houston apartment fell after the flood. An undocumented Mexican mother who prefers to remain anonymous given her citizenship status, she ended up temporarily living in a friend’s empty home. She slept on the floor with her husband, who is a U.S. citizen, and four kids, three of whom were born in America.

By the time they finally got their own place and paid two months of rent as a deposit, they were broke. Vanessa borrowed money to buy the beds for the children, but she and her husband had to wait three months before they could afford their own bed.

And they had to do something that they'd always avoided: get food stamps for the children.

“But only for a little bit. We are always worried that it would affect our future, our migratory status,” Vanessa says, even though her U.S. citizen kids are entitled to these benefits. “But we only asked for stamps. Never help for housing.”

Her fears, common among immigrants, were prescient. Had she applied for housing assistance, she would now be at risk of being evicted, since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is changing its rules so that if a household has even one undocumented member, the family won’t qualify for public housing units or rent vouchers. On top of that, the administration wants to make it easier to deny citizenship or visas to people that have applied for welfare or could be perceived as likely to do so in the future, by tightening the definition of what's called the public charge.

Latest in the series: Blocked Out

“There is an affordable housing crisis in this country, and we need to make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement earlier this year.

According to HUD, a household has to wait an average of 26 months to get housing assistance. And the department has expressed in statements that the new rule excluding mixed-status families will “help trim the waitlists.”

But, according to advocates and Texas housing officials, the change would do little to shorten wait times since most undocumented families don’t qualify for the assistance and mixed-status families don’t typically apply.

“The few that do it, mostly it’s through their kids, who are U.S. citizens,” said María Sosa, a tenant organizer with the immigrant group FIEL Houston. “It’s a lie to say that there are undocumented families receiving this kind of help and shows how much ignorance there is about this country’s policies.”

In Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, mixed-status families consist of 1% or less of those receiving housing assistance. In El Paso, such families make up 5% of those receiving assistance.