ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — Immigration authorities are demanding that landlords hand over lease agreements, rental applications, forwarding addresses, ID cards and other information about their tenants, a sign that the Trump administration has set its sights on landlords as part of a broad push for mass deportations.
Eric Teusink, a real estate attorney serving the Atlanta area, said several of his clients recently received letters requesting full documentation about their tenants. A rental application can include employment history, marital status and family relationships.
The two-page “information request,” which Teusink shared exclusively with The Associated Press, also asks for information about other people living with the tenant. One such request, dated May 1, is signed by an agent from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ fraud-detection unit. However, it is not signed by a judge.
It isn’t clear how many requests have been issued, but the documents could signal a new front in the government’s effort to locate people who are in the country unlawfully, many of whom were required to provide addresses in the United States as a condition of entering the country initially without a visa. President Donald Trump largely ended parole for people who were allowed entry during the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Experts question whether landlords should be compelled to comply
Some legal scholars and property managers say the demands raise serious legal questions because they are not signed by a judge, and if landlords comply, they could risk violating the Fair Housing Act, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.
Critics also argue that landlords may feel pressured to comply with something not ordered by a judge, while the person whose records are being sought may never learn that private information about them is in the hands of immigration authorities.
“The danger here is over-compliance,” said Stacy Seicshnaydre, a Tulane University law professor who studies housing law. “Just because a landlord receives a request doesn’t mean it’s a legitimate request.”
ICE agents have long used subpoenas signed by a supervisor to try to enter homes. Advocacy groups have mounted “Know Your Rights” campaigns urging people to deny entry if the document isn’t signed by a judge.
The information request reviewed by the AP comes from USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, which, like ICE, is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Although it isn’t signed by a judge, it threatens that a court could hold a landlord in contempt for failing to comply.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS, defended the issuance of information requests to landlords, without confirming whether they are currently being issued.
“We’re not going to comment on law-enforcement tactics in ongoing investigations,” McLaughlin said. “However, it’s false to say that ICE information requests can be ignored with impunity. ICE is authorized to obtain records or testimony through specific administrative-requests authorities. Noncompliance with an ICE administrative request can carry serious legal penalties. The media should stop spreading these falsehoods.”
These requests are new to many landlords
Teusink said many of his clients oversee multi-family properties and are accustomed to receiving subpoenas for other reasons, such as requests to produce surveillance footage or grant local police access to a property as part of an investigation. However, he noted, those requests are signed by a judge.
Teusink said his clients were baffled by the latest requests. After consulting immigration lawyers, he concluded that compliance is optional. Unless a judge signs off, the letters are basically just a civil servant making a request.
“It looked like they were on a fishing expedition,” Teusink said.
Boston real estate attorney Jordana Roubicek Greenman said one of her landlord clients received a vague voicemail last month from a ICE official asking for information about a tenant. Other local lawyers told her their clients had received similar messages. She told her client not to return the call.
Anthony Luna, CEO of Coastline Equity, a commercial and multi-family property-management company overseeing roughly 1,000 units in the Los Angeles area, said property managers began reaching out to him a few weeks ago amid tenant concerns about ICE requests. Most do not intend to comply if they receive them.
“If they’re chasing criminals, why aren’t they reviewing court documents?” Luna asked. “Why do they need records from housing providers?”
ICE requests predated Trump’s first term in office, but they surged significantly during his presidency, according to Lindsay Nash, a law professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law in New York, who has spent years documenting them. However, landlords rarely received them. The usual targets were state and local police.
ICE can enforce the requests, but first it would have to file a federal lawsuit and obtain judicial authorization for enforcement—a step that would allow the recipient to challenge it, Nash noted. She said recipients often comply without informing the person whose records are being disclosed.
“Many people see these requests, think they look official, think part of the language sounds threatening, and therefore comply, even when, as far as I can tell, some of these subpoenas have been too broad,” she said.
