Landlords Threaten Tenants With ICE

Weaponizing the law intimidate immigrants is illegal, yet increasingly prevalent, and shamefully ignored

The below piece is a guest post from Zeke Ahmed, a law student at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Law. It covers a top critical to Let’s Address This, fair housing, illegal ICE raids, and weaponization of law to intimidate immigrants and people of color. Corporate media has barely reported on this epidemic of abuse. Yet, it is critical we remain informed to protect ourselves, and our neighbors, against the rising tide of fascism in this country. Let’s Address This.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wait to detain a person on Jan. 27, 2025. [Photo Credit: Alex Brandon / AP file]

The Quiet Removal

By Zeke Ahmed

It does not start with a raid. It starts with an absence.

A name ignored. A lease that never arrives. A door that stays closed.

The immigrant does not scream. They notice. They lower their voice. They stay still. They do what they’re told, just a little more. Because here, silence is survival. But survival is not living. That is the cruelty we are asked to normalize.

The Daunting Data of Intimidation

During my time at the UIC Law Fair Housing Legal Clinic, we regularly encounter stories of tenants of color, immigrants, and voucher holders quietly excluded from housing. They’re told units are ‘no longer available,’ only to see them relisted. Often dismissed with vague comments about ‘fit’ or ‘culture.’ Fair housing testing confirms this reality: a 2019 study of 70 paired tests conducted by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, 43% revealed discrimination based on race, source-of-income, or both, often steering Black or immigrant applicants away from viable units.¹

We believed the Fair Housing Act would prevent this.² But bias learned to shift. It hides behind credit scores, eviction history, or subjective ‘criteria.’ Worse still, it walks with the machinery of state power. ICE.

This is pathology. In February 2025, under Illinois’s Immigrant Tenant Protection Act (ITPA), a Cook County judge ordered a landlord to pay more than $80,000 in damages for threatening to call ICE on tenants during a rent dispute.³ The threat was made solely based on their perceived immigration status. The first judgment under ITPA affirmed that such intimidation is unlawful.

But a single judgment does not end the war. Illinois has cracked the silence, but justice demands more.

What Does The Law Say?

The ITPA is clear: landlords cannot invoke ICE to intimidate or control tenants.⁴ But at the Clinic, I’ve seen how laws fall short of their goals. In one case, I was preparing a memo on housing discrimination involving USDA loans. I cited USDA civil rights protections — only to discover mid-draft that the Trump administration had scrubbed the relevant policy page. The erasure was not symbolic. It was administrative violence.¹⁰

Reading the ITPA felt like picking up a shield. But shields must be held. I thought of Chicago neighbors linking arms to block ICE, chanting, “You don’t belong here.”⁹ Moments when justice spoke louder than law.

Yet outside our clinic windows, skyscrapers loom over doorways where people sleep. That is the geography of injustice: institutional privilege casting shadows on constitutional rights wrapped in blankets. The ITPA gives voice. But only if someone answers the call. And fewer hands raise.

Shifting ICE Schemes

ICE moves in silence now. But its impact is still felt—just hidden. The media does not report every knock. Cameras do not catch the unmarked vans. But the fear is real, and the disappearances are not imagined. When one family is taken, an entire neighborhood retreats. Complaints go unfiled. Repairs go ignored. Rights go unclaimed. What begins as targeted enforcement becomes communal decay.

The Fair Housing Act bans discrimination based on national origin and religion.⁵ Yet applicants with foreign-sounding names or accents continue being treated differently. In 2023, over 34,000 fair housing complaints were filed nationwide. Nearly 17,000 tied to disability. Thousands more filed over race, color, and national origin.⁶ In Illinois, source-of-income complaints—from my experience at the clinic, a proxy for race or immigration status—tripled in the past year.⁷ Chicago’s Housing Rights Initiative documented 165 complaints for Section 8 refusals, including immigrant applicants, through undercover testing.⁸ The numbers speak. But often those most harmed remain unheard.

Those who carry out removals, through federal raids or systemic neglect, must know: there will be a reckoning. Wrongful deportations are not clerical mistakes. They are assaults on dignity and democracy. Systems that shield perpetrators today will not withstand history’s judgment. And the cowards who carry them out—those who hide behind masks, unmarked badges, and redacted files—will be known, too.

This is not just a warning. It is a call.

Protection Starts With Staying Informed

At the UIC Fair Housing Legal Clinic, we fight every day to protect the rights of tenants across Chicago. We educate clients on their protections under the FHA and the ITPA— including the rights to safe housing, to refuse intimidation, and to seek justice. We file complaints with IDHR, CCHR, and HUD, even when the process is slow, because accountability should never be optional.¹¹

Let those who fear us immigrants remember: Our roots grow deeper with every attempt to uproot us. Our voices grow louder each time you try to silence us. Our belonging here is not optional. It is the promise our laws made. Long delayed but not denied.

To every immigrant told to remain quiet: your silence is not protection. It is erasure. Speak. Claim your rights. Own your name. A world where you can live, pray, and speak your language without fear is not a dream. It is a demand. It is already written in law.

Hizqeel Ahmed (Zeke) is a UIC School of Law Class of 2026 JD Candidate. He can be reached at hizqeel2@uic.edu.

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Footnotes

1. Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Fair Housing Testing in Chicago Finds Discrimination Based on Race and Source of Income (Jan. 28, 2019), https://www.nlihc.org/resource/fair-housing-testing-chicago-finds-discrimination-based-race-and-source-income.

2. 42 U.S.C. § 3604(a) (2018).

3. MALDEF, Court Orders Landlord to Pay $80,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant (Mar. 3, 2025), https://www.maldef.org/2025/03/court-orders-landlord-to-pay-80000-for-threatening-to-call-ice-on-tenant/.

4. 765 Ill. Comp. Stat. 755/1 et seq. (2019).

5. 42 U.S.C. § 3604(a)-(b) (2018).

6. Nat’l Fair Hous. All., 2024 Trends Report (2024).

7. HOPE Fair Hous. Ctr., FY2024 Annual Report (June 2025), https://hopefair.org.

8. Disability Rts. Advocates, Chicago Housing Discrimination Filing Press Release (Apr. 29, 2024), https://dralegal.org/press/chicago-housing-discrimination-filing/.

9. Univ. of Chi. Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, I C U: Policing and Immigration Enforcement in Chicago (June 2021), https://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/2021-06/ICU%20Report_0.pdf.

10. Nina Lakhani, USDA Scrubbed Civil Rights Page as Black Farmer Protections Were Dismantled, The Guardian (July 22, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/22/usda-black-farmers-trump.

11. Univ. of Ill. Chi. Sch. of Law, Fair Hous. Legal Clinic, https://law.uic.edu/academics/clinics/fair-housing-legal-clinic/