As President Donald Trump revokes hundreds of visas and defends his policy of extraordinary rendition to El Salvador, San Francisco officials are facing an immigration dilemma of their own: How long can the sanctuary city shelter newly arrived immigrant families?
Right now, 344 families are living in San Francisco homeless shelters and trying to get into stable housing. The vast majority of them are immigrants and recent arrivals to the United States.
Since last December, they’ve been panicking: The city has started to enforce its 90-day cap on shelter, which was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic. Families can get an extension every 30 days, but face eviction if it’s not granted.
That prompted Supervisor Jackie Fielder to introduce legislation this week expanding shelter stays to a full year.
But because the city is short on shelter space, lengthening those stays means hundreds of other families — 255, according to the latest count — wait in the wings, hoping for a bed.
The longer the city accommodates those 344 sheltered families, helping them to get stable housing, the longer those 255 families, who are sleeping in cars or RVs, couch surfing, or staying in tents on the street, have to wait.
Advocates say Fielder’s legislation would keep at least those 344 families or so housed while they go through a process that can take up to eight months or more.
Take the case of Margarita Solito Sorto, an immigrant mother of four, who stepped into a three-bedroom apartment in June 2024 after getting a call informing her that she had been awarded an apartment. She and her husband, Jose Enrique Cruz, knew right away that they wanted to move in.
At that point, the Sortos had been living in a shelter for eight months; she would remain another two months before being cleared to move in.
That apartment, located on Mission Street in the Excelsior, was unfurnished and empty, and it felt like a reset for the family of six, who had fled to San Francisco in August 2023 because Sorto faced domestic abuse from her first husband.
For almost a year, Solito Sorto, Enrique Cruz, and the kids slept on mattresses in the Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 school gymnasium, which has served as a part-time shelter since 2018. Only curtains divided them and some 23 other families. Solito Sorto woke up her kids at 6 a.m., rushed the entire family to shower within 15 minutes, and hurried them to leave the gym before they were ushered out at 7 a.m. Families cannot return before 6 p.m.
“It was like being born again,” Solito Sorto said of the move to the Excelsior. “The kids are so happy. Their emotional and physical health improved so much.”
But the whole process of getting there took 10 months of jumping through myriad hoops: Getting social security numbers, work permits, a job with a paystub, and a credit history.
Kyriell Noon, the chief executive officer at Hamilton Families, a city-contracted shelter provider, said newcomer families stay in shelters between four and five months, on average, before they get housing.
“There are a lot of factors that go into finding housing, especially if you’re looking for housing that is relatively inexpensive,” added Shireen McSpadden, the director of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Some families have many children and need more bedrooms; some have kids with special needs; others want to live in a particular neighborhood; most just can’t afford the rent.
But Catherine Nieva-Duran, the family services manager at Hamilton Families, said the biggest barrier is immigration status.
The new policies apply to all families in city homeless shelters, but “about 90 percent of all shelter residents in San Francisco are newcomer monolingual Spanish-speaking families,” Nieva-Duran said.
“San Francisco is a sanctuary city, so many families come here to seek a new home, asylum, things like that,” she said. “The immigration process is extremely lengthy.”
On rare occasions, Noon said, some “mom and pop” landlords take families in, even if their incomes and credit history cannot be verified. Landlords “who are also immigrants themselves” are sometimes “willing to take a chance on the families because they themselves went through the same thing.”
There are city-subsidized affordable housing units, but a tiny number are open at any one time; just a single rental unit was available on the city’s housing portal on April 17, and 50 units for sale.
Otherwise, it’s just the market in a city where the average rent is still $2,700 a month.
The 90-day shelter cap was meant to create ‘flow’.
Since the city reinstated the 90-day limit, families staying in shelters have been chased by the deadlines to vacate every month.
In March, numerous attendees at a February meeting with Mayor Daniel Lurie told Mission Local that he promised families a reprieve. But 16 families got eviction notices anyway, though the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing said only three families were asked to leave the shelters.
The city has granted some last-minute extensions, and the homelessness department recently said that case managers can give families 30-day extensions until they get housing placement — or are evicted for lack of trying.
McSpadden, the city’s homelessness director, said the three families kicked out of shelters were not actively making progress to get housing. “They need to be working with their case managers. They need to be attending or making their appointments, either in person or on the phone. They need to be engaging with our system in some way.”
And, she said, the flow in the pipeline of housing has already improved: Data from the homelessness department shows that, from October 2024 to April 2025, the number of families on the shelter waitlist decreased, from 529 to 255. As sheltered families have been forced to find housing more quickly, unsheltered ones are waiting less time for their turn.
The rate of families getting housing placement, meanwhile, went up, from 21 percent to 26 percent between August 2024 and April 2025, the department said, attributing it to the new time limit.
Since implementing the 90-day cap, 20 more families have been able to stay in shelters, a bump from 324 in November 2024 up to 344 in March 2025.
The 90-day cap was also accompanied by a shift focusing on families who are “literally homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness,” said Emily Cohen, a homelessness department spokesperson. Those living “in the most dangerous living situations on the shelter waiting list” will also be given access to shelter first, Cohen said.
McSpadden expects the shelter waitlist to keep shrinking.
“We want to make sure that they’re truly engaging with our system, because if they aren’t, we need to move in people who are engaging with our system,” McSpadden said. “We’ve just got too many families out there who need these services. And that’s really what we were trying to do with this length-of-stay policy.”
Fielder, for her part, pushed back on McSpadden, saying the homeless department redefined its eligibility and rolled out new subsidies at the same time, both of which could have changed the number of people on the waitlist and exit into housing. “It’s not due to this stay policy,” she said.
Lack of shelter, lack of housing
The biggest obstacle to keeping immigrant families housed is the dearth of shelter beds and affordable housing, according to shelter providers across San Francisco.
Not enough shelter beds means long waitlists, increasing pressure on sheltered families to move along. But lack of affordable housing means it takes longer and longer for those families to find housing.
“Unfortunately, it does take time,” said Cohen of the homelessness department, speaking about housing units for homeless families once they leave the shelter. “We don’t have a ton of vacancies within these [units]. These are largely occupied.”
“We are witnessing what decades of underinvestment get us,” added Hope Kamer, the director of strategic initiatives at Compass Family Services, one of the city’s three main shelter providers for homeless families. Much of the time, city homelessness funds are spent on emergency shelter.
Kamer compared shelter space to the emergency room of a hospital; fine for the short term, but expensive to operate. If the city would invest more in long-term housing, Kamer said, it would cost less in the long run, like seeing a primary-care doctor to prevent illness.
Fielder, the District 9 supervisor and an advocate for homeless families staying in shelters, is for now focusing on the length of stay in city shelters. She’s calling her legislation, to be heard in committee today, a way to “protect a child’s right to shelter.”
“There is no city better positioned to house every single student than San Francisco,” Fielder said at a rally at Buena Vista Horace Mann on April 7. “This is not a poor city.”
McSpadden, for her part, said there has been a lot of conversation between the department and Fielder’s office. “I really respect her. She’s got a lot of concern for families,” McSpadden said. “I think we have a difference of opinion in how we’re going at this, but we will continue to work with her office.”
Providers, on the other hand, are just glad to see the city’s officials paying attention to the issue.
“We need strong allies,” Kamer said. “To have Mayor Lurie and Director [Kunal] Modi and Supervisor Fielder continue to keep family homelessness in the forefront of the public consciousness, and to drive up public concern, is invaluable.”
“For so long, we weren’t even talking about the homeless families.
image source from：https://missionlocal.org/2025/04/sf-shelter-stay-limits-immigrant-families/
