Court: Landlords aren't immigration agents
Published: Wednesday, May 09, 2012, 8:14 AM
Tenants of an apartment complex in Plainfield owned by Connolly Properties in 2008. A lawsuit filed against the group to stop immigrants from renting their properties was dismissed by a federal judge.Immigration policy is a complex web of competing local interests and national norms that has seen its share of debate in New Jersey.
As the federal administration struggles to pass comprehensive immigration reform, some governments in New Jersey have impatiently jumped into the fray to either limit routine work encounters by day laborers (Freehold), expand the workload of local police to include immigration enforcement (Morristown) or delineate the appropriateness of referrals to immigration authorities (state Attorney General’s Office).
As important as work, education, public safety and health are to the state’s immigrant community, nothing is as tied to presence in this country as housing. Regulating the housing market, by definition, regulates the presence of immigrants. And on that score, New Jersey recently added an important chapter to the protection of the civil rights of Latino and immigrant households in a federal court decision last month.
A landlord in Plainfield was sued — in a novel application of federal racketeering laws — by one of the tenants, who claimed the landlord rented apartments without considering a prospective tenant’s immigration status, knowingly renting to undocumented immigrants and accepting flawed documents as proof of legal status. The suit alleged that by refusing to investigate whether tenants were legal immigrants, the landlord harbored undocumented people in Plainfield and induced others to enter the United States illegally. And all of it, presumably, as an illegal racketeering enterprise under RICO laws.
The case, Bolmer vs. Connelly, was unprecedented. If victorious, the suit would have completely altered landlord–tenant relations. Landlords would become immigration agents, forced to navigate the intricacies of immigration law to determine who is lawfully here. And if they got it wrong, criminal penalties would follow. Tenants would be subject to increased housing discrimination and potential homelessness, including a disproportionate number of Latinos, legal permanent residents and citizens alike.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF addressed the court to support the landlord and halt this misguided attempt to decentralize immigration enforcement, which is a national issue. Our client was the Latin American Coalition, a nonprofit organization in Plainfield. Its members include tenants, residents and property owners, and its mission is to provide social services to Latinos.
Before the final arguments were made, the coalition filed for bankruptcy protection and couldn’t proceed — prompting the court to invite our attorneys to take the lead on defense. With the help of a local law firm, Duane Morris, LatinoJustice presented a vigorous defense to stop the extension of racketeering laws to routine landlord–tenant encounters.
Last month, we were vindicated when Judge Julio Fuentes of the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote an opinion recognizing that renting is not harboring a criminal and dismissed the RICO claims.
Often lost in immigration debates at the state level is that Congress has declined to make it a crime to be in the United States without documentation. The executive branch also frequently exercises its discretion not to remove people who lack legal immigration status for a host of economic and humanitarian reasons.
It was in this context that the lawsuit against the Plainfield landlord was lodged — part of a concerted effort to push the courts to make it difficult for New Jersey’s immigrants to assimilate into the social fabric through lawful means.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute also lent its support to the case. The institute is tied to the Federation of American Immigration Reform, founded in the 1980s by John Tanton, who has funding ties to modern day eugenics movement.
Thus, Plainfield was caught in the middle of a unsavory national effort to localize immigration enforcement, when the only sane and rational response to immigration in our increasingly globalized world is a federal response. Lucky for New Jersey’s Latino communities, the federal courts stepped in and stopped what would have been a major housing crisis in the Garden State.
Juan Cartagena is president and general counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF.
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