Donald Trump ran on a mass deportation platform, promising to round up and deport as many of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants as he could get his orange hands on. When it came to those families he couldn’t reach with his deportation force, he hoped his racist, anti-immigrant policies and executive orders would make their lives miserable enough that they’d just self-deport. Now it appears he’s getting some help from newly emboldened landlords that rent to undocumented immigrant families:
More and more tenants are reporting that landlords are threatening them with deportation in attempts to raise rent, evict, or simply avoid fixing things in their units.
Citylab reports that many attorneys are juggling cases in which landlords feel empowered to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement to handle their evictions, especially in areas around California where rent prices have skyrocketed as tech-related gentrification takes over.
Shirley Gibson of Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County told Citylab that she is currently working with a mother of three who had to take out a restraining order on her husband. The landlord simultaneously demanded she sign a new lease at a rent increase, and when she asked to show it to an attorney, he gave her an ultimatum: sign it immediately or he’d call immigration.
For folks who are outraged by this but might be wondering how this ties directly back to Trump’s government-sanctioned xenophobia, keep reading:
“She believed this manager,” says Gibson, “Because when he was making the threat he was wearing the red hat—the ‘Make America Great Again’ hat—and to her mind that meant, ‘This is a person who really hates me.’”
“The scale at which it’s happening has increased dramatically since the November election,“ said a policy advocate. “We have somewhere between two-and-a-half million and three million undocumented individuals living in California, most of whom are renters. Unscrupulous landlords are taking advantage of their knowledge of that fact to deprive tenants of their legal rights.”
“We have stories of this happening in every part of California,” they added. “The Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, rural areas like the Central Valley and the Central Coast.”
Fear has been a feature, not a bug, of this administration. In LA, immigrant women are not reporting domestic violence and rape out of fear of deportation. In New Mexico, children are skipping school out of fear of ICE raids. In Texas, ICE agents arrested an immigrant woman as she was leaving a courthouse, where she was attempting to obtain an order of protection against an abuser. And immigrant parents are canceling food programs for their children, even if they are eligible for them, in order to avoid being on ICE’s radar.
In the state, legislators are taking steps to strengthen the rights of immigrant families facing threats from these unscrupulous landlords:
Under California state law, landlords can’t ask a tenant or family about their immigration status. A bill before the state legislature, Assembly Bill 291—the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act of 2017—would strengthen renter protections by prohibiting landlords from disclosing a tenant’s immigration status to authorities. It would also make it illegal for landlords to threaten to report a tenant to ICE or otherwise compromise an undocumented tenant’s legal rights.
“Previously,” Gibson said, “when we were counseling people, we would say, ‘Look, the likelihood that, even if your landlord did call immigration authorities, that they would pick up the phone and listen to some random landlord, and that would inspire them to go pick someone up, [is] slim to none.’ Now, who knows? I can’t say to people that won’t happen.”