Barred from federal stimulus and living paycheck to paycheck, undocumented tenants rely on community groups—but both are running out of options.
By Woojae Julia Song and Alexandra Arriaga
Eunyoung has been here a year, Maria more than 20, but both of these undocumented mothers are living paycheck to paycheck on the edge of the housing cliff. (Art: Brian Herrera for City Bureau)
María Teresa Sánchez has no time to think.
She travels from Pilsen to Bolingbrook and back, nearly 30 miles each way, five days a week, to work in a factory where she makes $12 an hour. She spends hours caring for her husband, managing his dialysis treatment and talking with his doctors. Lately, it’s become so time-consuming that she had to take some days off work, which put a dent in the family’s sole source of income. On top of that, she’s juggling winter utility bills (the latest month cost $197), a 25-year-old son who’s staying at home with them (he’s on house arrest waiting for a court date) and landlords who want to increase the monthly rent by $300 (they settled on $150).
With the increasingly heavy weight of her responsibilities, in fact, Sánchez says she’d rather not think.
“It feels really heavy,” Sánchez says in Spanish. “I tell my husband that sometimes I even feel depressed.”
Eunyoung Jung’s day begins at 6:30 a.m. in Portage Park.
Once she gets ready for work, it’s a rush to wake her six-year-old son and catch a bus every weekday morning. After dropping him off at daycare, Jung (who requested to use a pseudonym to protect her identity) takes another bus to the northwest suburb of Niles. The wholesale fashion store where she works has had a steady stream of customers even during the pandemic, which she says has been a relief.
She and her coworkers get along well, and her manager lets her leave in time to pick up her son. This job allows Jung to pay $750 for rent and $1,000 for daycare each month. In a good month, she has maybe $200 left after paying for groceries and other essential expenses.
“I feel really thankful, truly. I’m so grateful to God,” Jung says in Korean. “I’ve met a lot of good people at my job.”
This is the delicate balance she’s rebuilt since early November, when she found out one afternoon that someone at her son’s daycare center might have been exposed to the coronavirus. The center shut down for two weeks immediately.
“I felt really panicked. I had to return to work the next day,” Jung recalls. “The only thing I could think about was that we’d have to find another daycare center.”
Sánchez has made Chicago her home for over 20 years, but she’s originally from Puebla, Mexico. Jung just arrived from Gyeonggi province, South Korea, a year ago. They’re both undocumented immigrants who’ve been working and caring for their families during the pandemic, with little to no support from the public programs that have kept their documented counterparts afloat.
The COVID-19 housing crisis is growing in Chicago. A patchwork of eviction bans and piecemeal financial relief have hardly stemmed the tide of people who have been displaced or forced to take extreme measures to keep a roof over their heads, according to local housing advocates.
For undocumented residents, the limited government safety net of renter protections and modest stimulus checks never even existed. And while some have found a lifeline of support through housing and immigration advocacy organizations, many others haven’t. They end up living in shelters or in unsafe conditions, outside or in hotels, racking up untenable amounts of debt or giving up necessities like food and hospital bills to put money toward rent. After exhausting every other option, some even resort to leaving the U.S. And despite the promise of mass vaccination in 2021, local experts warn that the situation could get worse for this already vulnerable group—especially as service organizations are stretched to the limit and run out of funding sources.
Raising the rent in January isn’t the first time Sánchez’s landlord has caused her trouble. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged across Chicago, with many tenants unable to pay rent on time or in full, Sánchez’s landlord left her a note last fall. “She said, the pandemic doesn’t matter [and] she needs the rent,” Sánchez recalls.
Sánchez didn’t bother to look for government resources, as many are only accessible to U.S. citizens and immigrants with legal status.
This housing crisis isn’t a new reality for many Chicagoans, where the minimum wage is far below what families need to afford housing in the city. But undocumented immigrants often face greater barriers to securing housing because landlords can exploit their immigration status.
“When you're an undocumented tenant, there are a lot of different limitations right from the application process,” says Antonio Gutierrez, cofounder of Autonomous Tenants Union and an undocumented resident. ATU is an Albany Park-based volunteer group that educates Chicagoans about their rights as renters and trains them to work with their neighbors to collectively gain better housing conditions.
Chicago law guarantees most tenants, regardless of immigration status, with rights such as heat during the winter, timely responses to repair requests and fair notice if a landlord plans to end or not renew a rental agreement.
Although landlords cannot legally discriminate against tenants based on their immigration status, most require records like credit reports, government-issued IDs and move-in or security deposit fees for a formal lease, says Gutierrez. This forces undocumented renters to rent through informal alternatives like unwritten, month-to-month leases that landlords can simply end by issuing a 30-day notice. Additionally, federal rules prohibit undocumented residents from accessing subsidized housing and public housing programs, which already have lengthy waitlists, unless they’re in mixed-status families.
City law also has a small but significant loophole: It doesn’t protect tenants living in an owner-occupied property that has six or fewer units. When Jung shared the news about her son’s daycare center with her landlords, who lived in the single-unit house where she rented a room, they demanded that she and her son leave to quarantine for 14 days.
“They looked at us as if we were pests,” Jung says. “They wouldn’t even let us near them.”
Not knowing how to respond, Jung hastily booked a room at a nearby motel. She spent roughly $2,000 on housing that month: $1,000 on rent and $1,000 on motel costs. She and her son received negative test results. Upon returning to the house after two weeks, Jung saw that her things had been cleared from the refrigerator. Her landlords told her to move out within 30 days.
The COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis have strained undocumented immigrants’ housing situations. An estimated one in three undocumented workers lost their jobs in the early months of the pandemic, and some landlords have used their knowledge of tenants’ immigration status against them, Gutierrez says. “It's very frustrating to hear that landlords are threatening their tenants with calling ICE or immigration, or doing illegal lockouts if they don't pay the rent.”
One ATU-supported tenant union, made entirely of immigrant renters, unionized in June 2020 after everyone in the building received a 30-day eviction notice. Now, four of seven households have moved out since starting the difficult negotiation process last September. With mounting emotional and financial pressures of facing eviction, Gutierrez says, two undocumented residents who lived in the building for 13 years decided to leave the U.S. forever.
Fear of retaliation from landlords has forced some undocumented renters into “nasty” and illegally negligent conditions, according to Leone Bicchieri, executive director of Working Family Solidarity. “The last few years with Trump as president, I’ve noticed a difference in how scared undocumented people are to defend their workplace and housing rights,” says Bicchieri.
Jung left Korea a little over a year ago after her now-estranged husband confessed that he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from a mortgage she’d known nothing about. She felt she needed to take herself and her son far away from him to get a fresh start. After months of searching in a pandemic economy, Jung found her current job last July. She loves the flexibility and relationships she has made through the job, but even though she works nearly full-time, money is really tight. “Once I pay for rent, transportation and the daycare center, we barely get to eat,” she says.
During the first months of the pandemic before Jung had found a job, she struggled to make ends meet. Neither the first nor second round of federal relief checks was provided to undocumented immigrants like Jung and Sánchez despite ample evidence that they tend to work in so-called “essential” industries like delivery and taxi services or industries that have struggled financially, like restaurants.
“That was really a slap in the face to the communities who are working so desperately hard just to get by,” says Glo Choi, an organizer at HANA Center, an organization that supports Korean, Latinx and other immigrant communities mostly in Albany Park and the northwest suburbs.
For undocumented immigrants like Jung and Sánchez, who are in such a tenuous situation economically, the pandemic pales in comparison to their struggles to make rent and put food on the table. Worries about contracting COVID-19 come second to having the money necessary to survive in the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant.
“I’m not afraid of the coronavirus, really. If I get it, I guess the worst that would happen is that I die,” says Jung. The thought of having to stay home and miss work hours for both Jung and Sánchez has been their biggest concern throughout the pandemic.
When Sánchez caught pneumonia around the same time that her husband had COVID-19 last year, it meant she had to miss a month off work. Seeing the bills pile up was more worrisome to her than anything else, she says.
In Chicago, COVID-19 assistance programs were open to all Chicago residents, in accordance with the Welcoming City ordinance that ensures city agencies do not discriminate based on immigration status. However, demand far outpaced the supply—funds from the city departments of housing and family and support services quickly dried up with thousands of households denied. (Because the city doesn’t track program applicants’ immigration status, it’s unclear how many undocumented immigrants were able to access the limited COVID-19 relief funds, according to a Chicago Department of Housing spokesperson.)
A few programs specifically supported immigrants. Through private donations, the city and The Resurrection Project announced the Chicago Resiliency Fund, which has distributed $1,000 each to 6,383 applicants who were excluded from federal stimulus aid. Illinois Department of Human Services funded a similar program in partnership with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where 8,900 applicants each received $1,500.
This left grassroots immigrant advocacy groups, like Working Family Solidarity and HANA Center, to fill in the gaps in local government services for vulnerable communities—something they’ve been doing for years, even decades.
But the current crisis has dwarfed previous problems. “Seeing how our community was affected by [the pandemic] was really heartbreaking because people didn't know what to do,” says Choi.
Sheltering in place without a support network, Jung says she felt depressed and deeply isolated. But since contacting HANA Center through an ad in a local Korean newspaper, she’s found support through the check-in calls, a small community grant and food packages that she received.
Housing sits at the very top of many undocumented people’s financial priorities. “It's the end of the month, you've gotta pay your bills. And what people would do is, they would borrow money from other people just to pay rent,” says Choi. “They're paying for rent, but they're going into debt everywhere else.”
Sánchez says Working Family Solidarity provided her with a couple of checks for $500 while she was sick at home and unable to work. “I paid the rent, I paid bills. Thank God, because of Leone, the gas and electric were paid and I didn’t get into debt,” Sánchez says.
Outside of their role in ATU, Gutierrez also works as an organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportation, an undocumented immigrant-led organization that fights deportations and the criminalization of immigrants and people of color. Much like HANA Center and other grassroots immigrant advocacy groups, OCAD has raised and distributed thousands of dollars in mutual aid funds since last spring. Undocumented families and individuals can request up to $300 from OCAD’s fund every month, and Gutierrez estimated that at least 40% of recipients use it toward rent.
“People feel a lot of anxiety,” Gutierrez says. “I have seen situations where individuals would rather give whatever amount we give them to their landlord in rent, instead of using that money to get food.”
However, the stress of the pandemic continues and has pushed even these nimble immigrant advocacy groups to the brink.
Since the pandemic began in mid-March, demand for HANA Center’s services has grown so quickly that the nonprofit needed to expand employment counseling and offer multiple COVID-19 assistance programs in partnership with the state, including direct cash and housing assistance grants. Throughout the pandemic, HANA Center and ATU have created informational posts for social media, hosted Zoom events and fielded calls from community members.
To keep up with demand, HANA Center has hired temporary contractors to work nights and weekends, says Jeonghwa Yi Boyle, director of immigration, housing and legal services. She estimates that the organization’s hotline received an average of 150 housing-related calls, texts and emails a week between August and December when the organization administered housing assistance programs that covered rent, utilities and mortgage payments for low-income immigrants. A majority of the 238 people who HANA assisted through housing programs were undocumented residents, according to Yi Boyle, and she worries that funding for such programs is drying up. “I feel like the entire state is wrapping up the COVID-19 emergency programs right now,” she says.
Bureaucratic rules sometimes bar qualifying undocumented immigrants from accessing help. Rules may exclude applicants who can’t prove they need housing aid because they’ve cobbled rent together by going into other types of debt; who can’t list their home address because they’re in illegal living situations; or whose landlords refuse to accept the grant money to cover their rent.
Choi and his family, who are undocumented, says his mother experienced the latter when her landlord wouldn’t agree to receive an assistance grant as her rent. Without her landlord’s written agreement, she couldn’t apply for the program. In other cases, some renters use their limited funds to pay rent instead of utility bills, then can’t qualify for rental assistance. “It's so backwards,” Choi says.
While Choi’s mother found relief through other programs, Yi Boyle worries for residents who are less connected to organizations in the community, who may not even know where to look for help. Even when government benefits are available to non-citizens, like local rent-assistance programs, Choi says undocumented residents hesitate to complete long applications for fear they will be rejected or face consequences for using government benefits because of the Trump administration’s legacy of anti-immigrant policies. Often they’re too afraid to receive “the very benefits that they deserve and that they are 100% eligible for,” he says.
While the recent news of COVID-19 vaccines has brought hope to some, the situation for undocumented immigrants in need of housing is unlikely to change soon. This recession has been the “most unequal in modern U.S. history,” and economists say low-income households and people of color will be the slowest to recover. For those who avoided eviction despite not paying rent, the bills will come due once the eviction bans are lifted, and housing experts predict an “eviction avalanche.”
Joe Biden’s proposed stimulus plan promises an additional $1,400 to those who were eligible for the last round of $600 relief checks, plus all mixed-status households. But no undocumented residents themselves will receive direct federal aid.
While eviction bans and relief programs have made a difference, Gutierrez says, these temporary programs offer individual solutions to a collective problem. Instead of addressing why housing should be a human right in the U.S., the conversation becomes, “If you can apply for this, you should be able to, and if you didn't get it, then that's too bad, you're still on your own,” Gutierrez says. At the end of the day, Choi says the government must provide stronger, broader relief measures and extend citizenship to everyone in the country.
A few proposed laws may protect tenants or limit the harm caused by evictions. If Chicago passes a “just cause for eviction” law, which exists in other large cities, landlords must give a reason for evicting a tenant or deciding not to renew a lease and provide moving assistance if the landlord evicts a tenant for a reason that isn’t the tenant’s fault. A proposed state bill would seal some tenants’ eviction records.
But with the future of those laws unclear, undocumented immigrants are finding ways to organize and defend themselves against eviction together.
Autonomous Tenants Union hosts renters’ rights workshops and trains tenants to organize neighbors and fight for better housing conditions. (Photo courtesy of Autonomous Tenants Union)
The Chicago Tenants Movement, a coalition of housing justice advocates that includes ATU, formed this summer to advocate for policy changes, to refer renters to assistance programs and to help tenants organize with their neighbors. They encourage renters to solve shared problems like maintenance issues, rising rents and no-cause evictions as a group, rather than alone. During the pandemic, ATU members have stopped evictions against undocumented residents and others while connecting hundreds of people to online resources and leading the growing tenant-organizing movement nationwide with demands like rent cancellation and long-term rent control.
Gutierrez says that although many people learned about tenant organizing for the first time in 2020, ATU has been building a safety net for vulnerable tenants—especially Spanish-speaking immigrants—since 2016. The group takes special care to work through the power dynamics between tenants and organizers along the lines of language, race and class. “We have seen in the last couple of years a huge shift in individuals understanding the power of collective organizing, and these union formations start becoming more of an understood action,” Gutierrez says.
The federal moratorium on evictions is approaching at the end of March, and as of Jan. 29, the state moratorium ends Feb. 6. As policies fail to prevent people from falling into housing instability during the pandemic, more people are seeking support through community organizations and with each other, and despite the difficulties, immigrants like Jung and Sánchez are determined to stay.
Sánchez and her husband have lived in Pilsen for 20 years; it’s where they first met, and it’s where they raised their son, a graffiti artist, who has a tattoo of the neighborhood name. They’ve lived in a two-bedroom apartment above a restaurant for nearly four years.
“We don’t want to leave, but without a way, we might have to,” Sánchez says. “The rent here is too expensive. There are two-bedroom apartments that go up to $1,500 or $2,000.”
When Sánchez first moved to the U.S. and to Chicago, she didn’t think life would be so difficult. At the time she already had four children and was pregnant with her youngest son. One of her children has been deported.
“The situation is critical, being an immigrant,” she says. “You think it’s going to be ‘pura vida’ but it’s not. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, you don’t pay rent, and where would you live?”
After a year of being forced to move repeatedly and navigate a new country during a pandemic, Jung has found small moments of peace for herself and her son. She found a new daycare and now rents a room in a different house where they have more privacy. Jung enjoys long bus rides to H Mart in Niles and appreciates how bus drivers lower the platform for riders with physical disabilities and children like her son. And while her son naps, she observes the diverse group of Chicagoans who ride with her.
“Honestly, we take the bus to kill time. I can look out the window and have some moments to myself,” Jung says.
When the pandemic ends, Jung says she really wants to make friends and find a babysitter to help take care of her son. Her parents and younger brother, with whom she’s close, have asked her to return to Korea multiple times.
“I think about them a lot. So much, so much,” she says. “They tell me it’s not too late to come back, but I have no intention of leaving, not yet.”
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