Burn the witch

A critique of Zeke Ahmed’s article on tenant protection in Illinois for Qasim Rashid, and the attendant comments

Polemic is in. Rational debate, out.

A week or so ago, a respected writer, Qasim Rashid, who writes on Let’s Address This, addressed the matter that, in the past year or so, he had lost over 300 paid subscribers because of his unrelenting defence of the Palestinians in Gaza. I subscribed to his blog as a result of that appeal to our humanity.

Yesterday saw my first venture into the comments section of one of his posts. It concerns a court case that was decided a short time ago, May of this year, in Chicago, Illinois. It was raised by tenants of a basement flat in that city against their landlords who, in contravention of a 2022 law, had, in the course of negotiating a higher rent for the property, threatened the plaintiffs with a denunciation to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The Immigrant Tenant Protection Act expressly prohibits such threats when conducting negotiations intended to set a rent price.

The piece was not written by Mr Rashid himself, but by a guest writer, Zeke Ahmed, a law student at the University of Illinois. Mr Ahmed is rightly outraged by the landlord’s conduct in that case. He works at the Fair Housing Legal Clinic run by his law school, which, he says, regularly encounters discrimination that excludes certain groups from housing. Reverting back to the case a quo, he continues:

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. 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.

I don’t know that much about the law of Illinois, but I can read a statute, and statutes need to be understood against some more general background. Contrary to what Ahmed writes, a single judgment has been known in many quarters to end many wars, in terms of the precedent that they set. Roe v. Wade ended a war, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ended it again: both single judgments that ended wars.

Illinois did not crack silence with the court judgment, however; it cracked that silence with the 2022 act. Justice (the concept of that which is just) may demand more, but justice (the courts system) doesn’t get the option to demand more until more is demanded of it. I really couldn’t understand the problem here. Except, I can, of course, as can you: someone mentioned the word ICE.

It is common practice to use every tool at one’s disposal to negotiate a price and the dangers of doing so are graphically set out in another article of mine entitled A bird in the hand is worth two on the lake.

A recent article in The Guardian even told with some amusement how a young man took his dad with him to buy a car, because his dad always gets the price down, whatever he buys (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jul/16/dad-has-never-been-afraid-to-bargain-the-day-i-bought-my-car-i-saw-a-master-at-work). So, threatening to denounce an illegal immigrant to the enforcement agency is, by all accounts, regularly resorted to as a price-augmentation tactic by landlords in Illinois, if nowhere else. Illinois has therefore forbidden it. The case was the first to test the new legislation.

Now, separately from that and before you dismiss me as an apologist for the ICE, I know little about them, except that their methods these days seem to allow them to act without identifying themselves, and their accommodations leave much to be desired. They are aggressive, undaunted and may possibly be forming into a sort of Schützstaffel for President Trump. But, like it or not, the ICE has a statutory duty. We have the equivalent of the ICE in Belgium too. Everywhere does. Here, they even deported someone I knew back to his country of origin: the United States of America. The ICE is not popular, but illegal immigration is not allowed. So someone has to take action against it, wherever you live. In the US, it’s ICE.

But, so the theory goes, they deport those who warrant deportation. The Illinois legislation is not about deportation, however; it is about one party exerting undue duress on a contract partner in the negotiation of a price. That is different, and I believe that a distinction has to be made among the duties that ICE carries out as part of its legitimate remit, those that are not part of its legitimate remit, and actions by third parties that result in action, legitimate or otherwise, being taken by ICE.

So, here is the situation. In 2022 the Illinois legislature passes the Immigrant Tenant Protection Act, which is very short, is prefaced by what its terms do not affect, and whose relevant proscription comprises a few short paragraphs:

a landlord shall not:

(1) unless required by law or court order, threaten to disclose or actually disclose information regarding or relating to the immigration or citizenship status of a tenant to any person, entity, or any immigration or law enforcement agency with the intent of harassing or intimidating the tenant, retaliating against the tenant for exercising his or her rights, or influencing the tenant to surrender possession; or

(2) unless required by law or court order, bring an action to recover possession of a dwelling unit based solely or in part on the immigration or citizenship status of a tenant.

I’d need to do a bit more research to know exactly why the law was passed, but I think I can reasonably guess that Illinois suspects that use of such divulgations to the authorities could cow tenants into accepting less favourable terms, and they think this is unfair and therefore they made doing so illegal.

Note: the law does nothing to proscribe any form of action by ICE itself. The law is directed only at landlords of residential properties in the state of Illinois.

Ahmed finishes his essay with the words cited below, which are inspiring and, whilst not quite of the style of legal analysis, are right as far as their call to action is concerned. However, Mr Ahmed’s credentials are stated to be that he is a law student and not a politics student. The one does not preclude the other, but, valid though his remarks are, they seem to shoot wide of what the court case was all about:

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.

It’s also a threat, and why not? Desperate situations call for desperate words. There is much emotion caught up in these lines alone:

• federal raids: true, ICE is a federal agency, their raids are federal raids. I’m not sure what the point of the word federal is, except that it means the raids are not instigated by the state of Illinois itself;

• systemic neglect: perhaps he means administrative errors, such as affected some deportations to El Salvador; otherwise the term is unspecified in the article;

• the mischief of the act in question is certainly tinged with aspects of dignity, but it essentially forms a limitation on the means by which rent can be negotiated. It is a limitation on the abuse of certain knowledge that might procure one of the parties an advantage. In that sense, the act promotes democracy by levelling the negotiation playing field, even if it doesn’t in terms of actual elections.

Mr Ahmed seems to circle around an entirely different argument—a very good argument, a powerful argument, but it actually has nothing to do, other than in the broadest sense, with what his article is about. What it is about is the court case of Escutia & anor. v. Contreras & anor. What follows is what I wrote in the comments section.

The case of Escutia and Garcia against Contreras and Contreras makes for interesting, if sparse, reading. Learning of the nature of the dispute actually does very little to illuminate the reader on the nature of the dispute. Why had Mr & Mrs Contreras argued with their tenant? Why was the access to the items stored in the attic refused? Or was it conditional? How come the tenants couldn’t say with any certainty what these items were? Were Escutia and Garcia noxious tenants? Noisy? Did the baby constitute a disturbance? And, with little to go on other than that the tenants “appeared” to be immigrants, all parties’ names seem to have a Spanish feel to them. This was not a case against a faceless corporation but between people of similar cultural antecedence, maybe? I don’t know whether that makes it better or worse, to be honest.

Whatever got this case started, the award seems high. The possible categories of damages are: conversion damages (what insurance would call “replacement cost”); and statutory damages - made up of actual loss (pecuniary, for material and immaterial loss and personal injury; a civil penalty of 2,000 dollars of damages per proven complaint); taxed lawyer’s and court fees; appropriate and just equitable relief. Notably, the court awarded nothing under “equitable and just relief”.

Punitive damages were pled for by counsel, and rejected by the court, in principle, note. Really, this is trying it on: the act states a reprehensible conduct and provides for a civil penalty (plus other categories of restitution). That civil penalty is the “punishment”, but plaintiffs wanted another bite at the cherry. No, said the court. However, the fact they were pled for may, perhaps, say something about the strong feelings in the case (I take it the plaintiffs were not liable to deportation even if they’d been reported to ICE?)

The award for actual damages (if based on personal injury, then according to the scale, if on property, then based on receipts) amounts to $40,000 per plaintiff. The total therefore is not $80,000 but in fact $84,050, plus lawyer’s and court costs. Escutia and Garcia did actually move (who can blame them?) and it would appear that the costs of the whole upheaval including mover’s van in Chicago, IL came to that large amount. I find that astonishing, but there it is.

In a way, the grounds for the dispute are immaterial. The act proscribes the use of such threats as part of a negotiation between tenant and landlord. They are words that simply may not be uttered from parties’ mouths. That’s it. So, the question in the state of Illinois, at least, is not whether you may denounce a person of reputedly unsure immigration status, because you can: the general public is in all matters of non-violent crime the biggest policeman in America. Because America pays grasses (1/3 of an income tax recovery).

No, you just can’t threaten such denunciation in order to hike the rent. All’s fair in love and war, and in the law of landlord and tenant. However, people do get shipped off to strange prisons in central America as the result of “admin errors”. There could just be a Barbra Streisand effect to this court case.

Maldef: if the scrupulous tenants who come to them as the result of unscrupulous landlords tell Maldef the identities of the wolves at their door, then they will know who’s within the radar, won’t they? So, if persons who think they may encounter such denunciation problems go first to Maldef to ask about their landlord’s probity in terms of complaints under the act, that will sort the wheat out from the chaff a little bit in the upstream direction. As far as those of Latin American origins are concerned. Sorry, Haiti.

MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), if you’re unaware, is a legal representation organisation protecting the interests of the Latin American community in the United States.

Now, that is a legal analysis, not of the report by Mr Ahmed, but of the court judgment as handed down. My analysis fundamentally disagrees with Mr Ahmed’s. He says justice demands more. I say that this is precisely what justice demands, in terms of the statute and in terms of justice as a concept. Neither Mr Ahmed nor Mr Rashid has replied to or acknowledged my comment, which is one of 46 as of the time of writing this, some of which have been liked by the author (Rashid). He may not have seen my comment, of course.

In response to a further contribution by another party (“There seems to be no depravity, no criminal behavior that ICE will not stoop to and that Trump et al will not bless. Just see what SCOTUS let loose in this country~ Impeach the traitors.”), I responded with:

ICE are not my poster boys, but the reprehensible behaviour here is not ICE’s, it’s Mr & Mrs Contreras’s.

Well, yes and no: it’s a proximity argument. If ICE didn’t deport people, such threats would be meaningless. But ICE does deport people, which is why the threats are proscribed, whether founded or otherwise. The point is that denunciation of a known illegal immigrant is not proscribed by this law.

I then intervened in a conversation about how one contributor had been taken more and more aback by government action: “It is more outrageous daily since Jan. 20, 2025. What’s going on should be obvious to people who pay attention. It’s those who aren’t paying attention and don’t read alternate news sources who need to be better informed. How to do that?”

Allow me to recap: a report about a court case dealing with a complaint under the tenant protection legislation, based on a threat by a landlord to report a contract party he was in disagreement with to ICE, has become an enquiry into why people don’t read alternate news sources. The nature of the comment may itself explain why people don’t read alternate news sources, but I don’t want to presume. Meanwhile, a law student has written about the case to say that the case is a call (not to read alternate news stories, I suspect)

The above lady’s correspondent replied “This started long before January 20, 2025.” I had just read the judgment, and I wondered why that date had been mentioned. The court case dated from 2022, the year the legislation was introduced. So I added my comment: “2022.”

In the course of later exchanges, it would transpire that “this” had not, as I assumed, been the court case; rather what was meant was the present situation in the US. That is not entirely clear when the whole article is about a court case—bear that thought in mind for a while.

Finally, I pointed out to the correspondent the following:

Look, I really want to be friends, but I feel you’re accusing me, and in fact accusing the plaintiffs in the case reported on, of things that we’re just not accountable for, like the election of Mr Trump. That’s fine, no problem, but I feel that you are not advancing your arguments by attacking everything as being Trump’s fault. Because I don’t think this case was Trump’s fault.

It’s a claim based on Illinois legislation passed in 2022 to protect tenants in that state (look, it’s here: https://law.justia.com/codes/illinois/chapter-765/act-765-ilcs-755/). I don’t think Trump would have passed a law like that. Plus, the plaintiffs have received an award. The law works. They were threatened contrary to the law, complained, and got $84,050. That has to be good?

It was then that the argument started. Feral Finster advanced the proposition: “Law is meaningless. Enforcement is the only thing that matters.” Here’s what ensued:

You can’t enforce a law that doesn’t say the right things. You asked, so here it is: what the law says (relevant part):

[quoted above]

Enforcement depends on someone breaching that proscription. If they do, it’s actionable. If they don’t, there’s nothing to enforce. But, how does the court determine the motivation behind someone’s acts if they are racially motivated but concealed under a pretext?

This ground for action is not only nebulous, it is hard to prove and just as easy to disprove. But I bet it made headlines in the local Chicago newspaper when it was passed.

Feral Finster:

I am not sure what you are trying to say here, but this assumes, among other things, that a judge will fairly apply the law, and that it will be enforced.

Try quoting law codes to an armed robber. The robber already knows that armed robbery is a violation of about seventy different criminal statutes and does not care. Hold a loaded Colt Python to that robber's head with the sure knowledge that you will without hesitation pull that trigger and he will be the one in tears, and he won't care whether or not you have the right to kill him or not.

The government increasingly resembles that robber.

At this point, having dwelt for a few seconds on the prospect of success in citing the provision of the Criminal Code he was in the course of contravening to a man pointing a shotgun up my hooter, I was unsure why armed robbers had even been mentioned.

Graham Vincent:

Well, first, there wasn’t an armed robbery here. What I was trying to say was, in a friendly manner, that the case started in 2022. That’s all.

Feral Finster:

I am trying to provide an analogy. The point is that it doesn’t matter what the law says if you cannot back it up. If you can back it up with force, you can ignore any law.

Now, to be fair, Feral has a point there. It’s just not a point that has anything remotely to do with the case. This case was brought based on legislation, and the judgment founded on the legislation to make what I regard as a handsome award to the plaintiffs. The law was not usurped; it was followed. There was no force, except that which was brought to bear unlawfully by Mr & Mrs Contreras.

Graham Vincent:

For the last time, the law was NOT IGNORED. The court issued an order in the plaintiffs’ favour. The statute did exactly what its lawmakers had wanted. What more do you want? Don’t answer that. This correspondence is closed.

Well, Feral was having none of that; this correspondence closed when they said so:

If any person wants to ignore the law, it will, unless you have a way to make them do otherwise. This applies to courts and private persons.

I demurred on a final response.

In a last exchange, Lianne Doherty commented: “Thanks to our dear leader, lawlessness & immigrant abuse rein supreme! I hate what this country has become! Thank you, Qasim, for bringing this situation to our attention. Only when we are properly informed, can we fight back.”

It was too good to pass up on, so I replied, “If you mean Mr Trump, this case was brought under Illinois legislation dating from 2022, when the “leader” was Joe Biden. But it’s state legislation, not federal. You are not properly informed, I’m sad to say.”

This may all sound like he said, she said, telling tales to teacher, but if these exchanges are typical of the discussion on public forums of the current state of American politics, leaving aside the subject on which that article was even written, then the conclusion has to be that the whole political forum has devolved into precisely he said, she said.

Now, I render no judgment on the contributors to Rashid’s article. If they dislike Mr Trump, they say so, regardless of what the topic actually is, as in this case. I spoke yesterday about the distance at which to focus on the Trump administration: too close in is too much detail to process. But, here, too far out makes the criticism indiscriminate and unfocused. It starts to sound a little like this Monty Python sketch, below. Those who have twigged what I’m driving at above, in terms of relevance and pointed criticism, may sit back and enjoy the satire. Those who haven’t can forget all of the preceding, and also enjoy the fun.

And, Qasim, if you’re reading this, it might not just be your support for Palestinians, which I still endorse wholeheartedly, that has lost you customers; it might just be your subscribers’ propensity to flatly deny anyone who attempts to produce anything like a rational argument based on the topic actually up for discussion.

“Weaponizing the law [to] intimidate immigrants is illegal, yet increasingly prevalent, and shamefully ignored” is Qasim’s buy-line to the article. It does not even indicate that the statutes designed to stop such acts are at least sometimes enforced and not ignored. Qasim has a quest, as do we all: to see things for what they are and educate our readers accordingly. But to say that a law is shamefully ignored and then continue to explain how it has not been ignored is a misrepresentation of the facts, not as dissimulated by the article in question, but as actually presented by it.

It is not he with the most vitriolic rhetoric that should prevail, nor he who appeals most tenderly to the heartstrings. It is he who is right. Mr Rashid has been copied.