It seems the state of Alabama wants its complete intolerance of undocumented immigrants to be crystal clear. Just last week, Rep. Mo Brooks (R–AL) told his constituents in a town hall meeting that he would, “…do anything short of shooting them, anything that is lawful.” These comments came on the heels of the state’s passage of a new immigration law, HB 56, which is even more severe than Arizona’s now infamous SB 1070.
Check out the video to see Brooks in action.
As NCLR’s Elena Lacayo noted earlier this week, “[Alabama] Republican Governor Robert Bentley signed HB 56 into law, seizing the title of harshest anti-immigrant legislation in the nation from Arizona’s widely reviled SB 1070. This sweeping anti-Hispanic bill mimics the draconian Arizona legislation, providing local law enforcement with an overly broad license to investigate residents’ immigration statuses, thereby opening the doors to racial profiling. Alabama’s bill goes a step further by requiring schools to collect information on the citizenship or immigration status of their students, bringing discrimination back into Alabama’s classrooms.”
This distinction, however, seems to have not been enough for the state legislature. Alabama’s new law already includes a provision that would bar landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants, but a lesser-known tenant law passed on the last day of the state legislature could intensify the effects of the housing provision in HB 56.
From The American Independent:
The bill amended Alabama’s Landlord and Tenant Act, making it easier for landlords to terminate rental agreements and shortening the time tenants have to appeal before they are evicted from their homes.Alabama’s landlord-tenant law was passed in 2006 under a Democratic legislature (before its passage, Alabama was the only state in the country not to have a tenants’ rights law). The law allowed tenants to more easily compel their landlords to provide necessary services in their dwellings, and protected them from retribution from their landlords for complaining about poor living conditions. It also streamlined the process by which landlords could collect unpaid rent, establishing a seven-business-day waiting period after landlords notify their tenant before they can begin the eviction process. In short, the law benefited both tenants and landlords to a certain extent.
HB 423 (PDF), which was passed on June 9, gave new powers to landlords, allowing them to terminate rental agreements after a fourteen-day waiting period if a tenant commits “an intentional misrepresentation of a material fact in a rental agreement or application,” meaning the landlord believes that the tenant lied or misled the landlord on some issue relevant to the lease. The power is granted only to landlords; tenants have no equal power to cancel their lease because of a landlord’s “misrepresentation of a material fact.”
A landlord can knowingly rent to an undocumented immigrant, says Alabama Appleseed’s legal director Shay Farley, and on any particular day use a tenant’s undocumented status as an excuse to invalidate their rental agreement with only a fourteen-day waiting period to contest the decision. That period can be shortened to seven days if the tenant accused of being undocumented is also late on their rent.
“If you knew all along that Jose Gonzalez was an undocumented immigrant, but if you don’t like him as a tenant because he pays on the seventh and not the fifth, you can go back and say ‘you misrepresented material fact’, and that will validate terminating his lease,” Farley says.
HB 423 also does not include any guidance as to what facts could be construed as relevant to the rental agreement. A misrepresentation of facts could be anything that the landlord deemed relevant and would be considered a “noncurable offense.” This essentially means that the tenant would have no recourse to remedy the offense and would have to prove to the landlord that the misrepresented “fact” is irrelevant to the rental agreement.
The law doesn’t stop there.
The American Independent goes on to report that in addition to the “material fact” offense, the new law lists three other offenses that would serve as grounds for ending the lease: “possession or use of illegal drugs on the rental property or ‘common area’; discharge of a firearm on the property (except in cases of self-defense or defense of a third party); and criminal assault of another tenant or guest while on the property. Farley believes that the “possession or use” offense could lead, for example, “to a grandmother being evicted because her grandson is smoking pot in the backyard.”
HB 423 sailed through the Alabama legislature with virtually no opposition. No senators and just six state representatives voted against the reform law that completely gutted the state’s only tenant’s rights protections. Now, with one fell swoop, the state of Alabama has at once threatened landlords with up to 20 years in prison for renting to undocumented immigrants (HB 56) while also providing them legal recourse necessary to terminate lease agreements with little notice using the suspicion of one’s immigration status (or any other “materially relevant fact”) as the reason for termination (HB 423).
It seems Rep. Brooks won’t have to resort to shooting immigrants after all. His home state seems to be taking care of it just fine through harmful—yet “lawful”—legislation.