Across the country, cities and states have been grappling with how to resist the Donald Trump administration’s escalating and increasingly violent mass deportation raids. Some have moved to ban masks and bar local law enforcement from helping federal agents. Others have hinted at prosecution for federal agents who violate the law and looked to bar them from entering certain types of locations.
In California, Los Angeles County is poised to respond in a potentially more effective way: with an eviction moratorium.
Momentum for a countywide eviction moratorium has been building in LA for the past few months, ever since the Trump administration drastically ramped up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids there this past June, leading to scenes of chaos and violence on American streets. Now thanks to pressure from local tenant unions and immigrant rights groups, it’s on the verge of becoming law, if the county board of supervisors votes it through in the coming weeks.
“The eviction moratorium demand is just one part of the organizing against ICE in the tenants union,” says LA Tenants Union (LATU) organizer Lupita Limón Corrales, who points to other actions like food distribution and neighborhood patrols. “It’s just one way to defend our neighbors in our city.”
On October 14, the board voted 4–1 to declare a state of emergency over the federal raids, a necessary legal precursor for allowing a moratorium to be enacted. Now the measure faces its final hurdle, with the board likely to vote directly on the idea in the coming weeks, and supporters hopeful that they have won over a majority of the five-person board.
If so, it would be a victory not just for undocumented people facing the Sophie’s choice of eviction or arrest but for housing activists in the sprawling county composed of eighty-eight cities and ten million residents. And with the demand now having spread to Chicago, another city hit hard by Trump’s immigration raids, it could…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
