Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dropped a truth bomb on camera Thursday, about rents and illegal immigrants and ICE. It’s not complicated. It’s not xenophobic. It’s supply and demand — the most basic principle in all of economics, applied to the most basic human need in the entire economy.
He said: “People don’t want to admit it: where ICE goes, rents go down.”
Between 10 and 25 million illegal aliens entered this country during the Biden years. Every single one of them needed somewhere to live. American housing supply didn’t expand to accommodate them — because local governments in blue cities and states have spent decades making it nearly impossible to build new housing through exclusionary zoning, endless permitting requirements, environmental reviews that drag on for years, and every other obstacle that NIMBYism and progressive governance can devise. Unlimited demand. Artificially restricted supply. The result was entirely predictable to anyone who passed high school economics.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent just dropped a truth bomb FOR THE AGES.
"People don't want to admit it: where ICE goes, RENTS GO DOWN."
"Was it 10, 15, 25 million illegals? There's NO new housing stock. So you saw rents go through the roof."
Mass deportations solve… pic.twitter.com/jF2IphKUIm
— USA Features Media (@USAFeatures) August 7, 2026
The Dallas Fed confirmed it with numbers. The surge in unauthorized immigration during the Biden administration accounted for roughly 30% of home-price growth from 2021 through 2024 and 20% of rent growth in the average American metro area. One in five dollars of your rent increase. Paid for by the policy choices of a president who called open borders compassionate and called anyone who questioned it racist.
Now ICE is doing its job. Demand is falling. And where demand falls, prices follow. That’s not a Republican talking point. It’s an economic identity.
Bessent is also intellectually honest enough to state the full picture — something this administration deserves credit for. Deportations solve some of the demand side of the equation. They do not solve the supply side. The reason Dallas has affordable housing and Los Angeles doesn’t is not primarily immigration. It’s governance. Texas builds. California blocks. One city puts new housing units up in months. The other takes years, if it allows them at all. Just ask the Pallisades fire victims, many of whom are still trying to get the permits (i.e. Los Angeles city government permission) to rebuild.
The complete solution requires both: enforce the border and restore sanity to housing supply regulation. Deregulate land use. Reform permitting. Let the private market build what Americans need. Stop treating new apartment buildings like environmental catastrophes that require four years of review.
Democrats built the housing crisis in two ways simultaneously. They let millions of people across the border with no plan for where they’d live. And they made it impossible to build enough homes to house the American citizens already here. Then they blamed landlords. Then they passed rent control — which every economist of every political persuasion will tell you makes the problem worse by reducing supply further.
The Biden administration created the demand shock. Democratic city and state governments created the supply constraint. And now the left is outraged that Bessent named what everyone with a checking account already knows.
Where ICE goes, rents go down. It isn’t complicated. It just required someone with the nerve to say it out loud.
