Secretary Scott Turner said on Tuesday that the Department of Housing and Urban Development shut down three of its field offices because of “unrest.”
Two of the offices are in California, where major immigration protests have been in the national spotlight since last week, and one is in New York, a spokesperson for HUD told NOTUS. Details of what led to them being shut down were unclear, as was a timeline to reopen them.
“They will be reopened when leaders get their cities under control and respect the rule of law,” said Kasey Lovett, the spokesperson for HUD, in an email to NOTUS.
In an exchange over disaster recovery funding at a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Turner told Democratic Rep. Norma Torres of California that “we just had to close two field offices in California due to the unrest going on.”
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But it was the only time he mentioned the closings in the nearly two-hour-long hearing.
Earlier in the day, Turner tweeted a photo of a Los Angeles federal building covered in graffiti with the caption, “HUD hasn’t closed a single field office, but unlawful rioters have now forced us to close three.” NOTUS contacted the office pictured in the post, but the call went to voicemail.
Lovett did not clarify which other offices had closed, but a call to the Santa Ana, California, HUD field office also went to voicemail. Santa Ana has also been the site of federal immigration raids and protests.
NOTUS also did not get an immediate response to an inquiry to the regional office located in New York City. The office’s address is listed as being in the same federal building as a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement detainment center. Two Democratic lawmakers were denied access to that detainment center over the weekend.
HUD operates 65 field offices across the country to provide federal housing support and mortgage assistance. Bloomberg reported in March that the department is reportedly working on plans to close field offices in every state and leave only six regional offices.
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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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