If a landlord suspects their tenant of a crime, they can call the police.\u00a0 Not only is this totally unremarkable, it\u2019s probably the wise and proper course of action.\u00a0 So why would it be any different for a landlord to report illegal aliens, who are engaged in continuous law-breaking simply by remaining in this country, to the proper federal authorities?\u00a0 It shouldn\u2019t be, but the open-borders crowd thinks it\u2019s some kind of outrage, and from coast to coast they\u2019re trying to impose severe consequences for this perfectly reasonable exercise of common sense.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, California actually passed a law in 2017, Assembly (AB) 291<\/a>, that bans landlords from reporting their tenants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).<\/p>\n And now, to what should surely be the surprise of no one, an illegal alien tenant in California is using that very law to sue her landlord<\/a>.\u00a0 According to illegal alien Estela Cano\u2019s August 21 lawsuit, threats to contact ICE were part of \u201cmonths of abuse,\u201d but according to landlord Melinda Teruel, Cano and her family caused at least $16,000 in damages to the property.\u00a0 Teruel gave Cano a 30-day eviction notice in July 2017, more than a year ago.\u00a0 Only in California?\u00a0 One can only hope.<\/p>\n But if Washington, D.C., City Councilmember Brandon Todd (D) gets his way, it won\u2019t be<\/a>.\u00a0 His bill, B22-0877<\/a>, introduced on June 26, would go even further than California.\u00a0 It would actually make reporting or threatening to report illegal aliens to ICE by landlords, employers, or others under some circumstances a felony, extortion, punishable by up to ten years in prison.<\/p>\n And if you rent to ICE itself rather than to illegal aliens?\u00a0 Like Chuck Prather<\/a> in St. Petersburg, Florida, you can probably look forward to being publicly tarred as a \u201cpredator\u201d and subjected to all sorts of other abuse, harassment and threats that border on stalking.\u00a0 Prather\u2019s businesses and home were plastered with fliers saying he \u201cdirectly profits from sexual violence, physical abuse and the caging of undocumented people\u201d, while a nearby sidewalk was spray-painted \u201cEVICT ICE.\u201d<\/p>\n Already, the rational rejection of policies like this one has begun.\u00a0 Even in Illinois, Governor Bruce Rauner (R) \u2013 who signed the State\u2019s sanctuary law, apparently thought legislation<\/a> like California\u2019s went too far and vetoed it<\/a> on August 24.\u00a0 And in the little Nebraska town of Scribner<\/a>, an initiative will be on the ballot in November to require proof of legal status by anyone seeking to rent residential property\u2014an initiative modeled on nearby Fremont\u2019s similar ordinance, which the courts upheld<\/a> as constitutional back in 2013<\/a>.