As a member of the rent stabilization board in East Palo Alto, Laura Rubio has heard it all. From negligent landlords to hostile property managers, tenants in this working-class Bay Area suburb have long contended with an array of challenges.
But with Trump’s deportation agenda fueling fear in immigrant communities, Rubio says cases of discrimination and harassment are on the rise.
“My mission as a community leader is to avoid the displacement of our community,” said Rubio in an interview with American Community Media. “That’s why I dedicate many hours of my free time to working on these issues.”
Speaking in Spanish, she ticked off an array of cases, including that of a Latina mother forced to buy ice for a cooler to keep her kids’ milk cold because there was no refrigerator in the apartment, and a property manager — herself Latina — who threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a group of tenants.
According to Rubio, immigrant tenants are experiencing a rise in such threats, despite the fact that cities like East Palo Alto — a majority Latino city where 40 percent of residents are foreign born — have in recent years enacted rent control and tenant protections from eviction into their local laws.
She pointed to a recent community hearing over a proposed ordinance to impose residential parking fees, which she said would hit the Latino community particularly hard.
“A lot of times people are forced to live in apartments with two or three families,” she noted, as rents in the city and across the Bay Area climb. Parents, for example, will have separate cars to go to work while most apartments only allot a single space. “This absurd policy of wanting to charge everyone for parking, it was going to affect many, many people.”
A public outcry ultimately succeeded in defeating the measure, which Rubio described as “racist,” though social media posts after the fact — including one suggesting that a call to ICE could help resolve the parking issue — point to simmering antipathy toward East Palo Alto’s immigrant community.
Advocates say a similar pattern is emerging in Los Angeles, where earlier in the summer Marine and National Guard troops were deployed en masse as part of the Trump Administration’s militarized approach to immigration enforcement. In Southern California alone, over 4,000 individuals have been detained in mass raids since June 6th.
“We’re all in crisis response,” said Carla De Paz, who leads the Community Power Collective, noting fear in the community caused by the raids is now beginning to be felt inside the home. “We’re worried that landlords will be emboldened to use immigration status as a threat to evict tenants.”
In one such case first reported by the LA Times, the lawyer for a Latino family in Baldwin Park that filed suit against their landlord and real estate agent for illegal eviction received a letter from the lawyer representing the agent urging the family to drop the case. “Your clients are likely to be picked up by ICE and deported prior to trial,” read part of the letter.
De Paz’ organization has put forth a joint advocacy letter calling for an eviction moratorium in Los Angeles. With the rising number of families that have lost income sources due to deportation, the coalition wants to protect tenants who are financially struggling, and they are calling for legal enforcement of tenant protections in cases where landlords threaten to call ICE or other federal agencies as a form of harassment.
The LA Housing Department is also currently finalizing anti-harassment guidelines pushed for by tenant organizations, though enforcement remains an issue. A recent audit by the City Controller found that just 23 of 11,000 complaints from tenants involving harassment were forwarded to the City Attorney’s office.
And while California’s state legislature passed the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act in 2017, prohibiting a landlord from asking tenants about their immigration status or threatening to throw them out on that basis, many tenants remain hesitant to come forward with their concerns.
“We are very aware that a lot of families and individuals have a very heightened fear of speaking out,” said Kevin Kish, director at the California Civil Rights Department. “Once that initial reluctance, lack of knowledge, lack of trust is overcome, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in Shasta or El Centro or LA, you’ll have the same level of service from our department.”
Still, lower-income communities often lack the resources needed to address tenant violations. Landlords are much more likely to have legal representation in eviction cases, and tenants lack access to nonprofit or pro-bono legal services, except in a handful of cities that have Tenant Right to Counsel programs.
Often just getting the information to the people who need it can be a challenge.
“There are not many organizations that are putting the information out about rent control, about tenants’ rights” in East Palo Alto, said Rubio.
She described a local community program that trains youth leaders to do outreach in the city, including educating residents on tenants’ rights. In one recent encounter, a property manager called the police on the high school students as they were canvassing a local apartment building, she said.
Referencing a nearby apartment complex, Rubio said residents there only just learned their homes were going up for sale. “I have to inform all the tenants there about what their rights are to avoid them being displaced,” she said. “It’s a wave of bad news.”
Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the date that the California Immigrant Tenant Protection Act passed. It passed in 2017, not 2019. We regret the error.
