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MALDEF mentioned that is the second time it has sued a landlord beneath the Immigrant Tenant Safety Act (ITPA), “a 2019 Illinois regulation that bans landlords from utilizing a person’s immigration standing to discriminate or harass a tenant.” California handed an identical regulation beneath former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017, because the state was seeing a surge in tenant harassment by landlords emboldened by the anti-immigrant insurance policies of the earlier administration.
“Hire will increase, evictions up in immigrant communities beneath Trump, housing attorneys say,” The Sacramento Bee reported on the time. In a single occasion, a landlord additionally threatened to report a housing lawyer who had come to the help of an immigrant tenant who’d acquired an unlawful eviction order. “I imagine the State Bar of California shall be (in) my grievance, beneath the brand new management of our president,” a landlord boldly warned the housing lawyer in a textual content, the report mentioned.
Day by day Kos’ Marissa Higgins wrote in 2019 {that a} decide ordered one New York Metropolis landlord to pay $17,000 to an undocumented immigrant tenant she harassed. “They’ll deport you,” Dianna Lysius instructed Holly Ondaan in texts. “Attorneys concerned within the case imagine that is the primary occasion wherein an individual was fined for making ICE-related threats and might be utilized in establishing precedent,” Higgins wrote on the time.
Knowledge confirmed there was additionally a disturbing spike in abusers weaponizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) towards their victims. In response to the Immigrant Protection Venture’s ICE Out of Courts Coalition, “Stories of alleged abusers threatening to name ICE to cease their victims from in search of assist has skyrocketed by 78.6% since early 2017.”
“Landlords ought to by no means be allowed to take advantage of their tenants’ immigration standing to safe an unfair and coercive benefit within the housing rental association,” mentioned MALDEF President Thomas A. Saenz. “Fortuitously, the ITPA prohibits this conduct and may result in all Illinois landlords abandoning techniques corresponding to threatening to contact ICE.” Susana Sandoval Vargas, MALDEF Workers Legal professional, mentioned “[i]t is essential that landlords cease weaponizing tenants’ perceived immigration standing in landlord-tenant disputes.”
MALDEF helped safe the historic 1982 Supreme Courtroom victory that ensures a public college schooling for all kids no matter immigration standing. Following the right-wing Supreme Courtroom’s draft compelled resolution, the way forward for that ruling is now unsure, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to problem the ruling.
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