Tension of immigrants' status brews in N.J. municipality

PLAINFIELD, N.J. - A federal lawsuit challenging landlords' right to rent to illegal immigrants has stoked tensions over immigration that have been rising for years in this diverse city of 50,000 south of Newark.

A prominent anti-illegal immigration group filed suit against a Plainfield property-management company this month, seeking to set a legal precedent by using antimob legislation to crack down on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants.

The civil suit alleges that the company has so many undocumented tenants in its buildings that the situation constitutes unlawful harboring and that the company should be considered by the courts as a criminal enterprise that encourages illegal immigration.

The suit was brought by the Immigration Reform Law Institute - the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform - which previously backed the nation's first anti-illegal immigration ordinances in Hazleton, Pa., and Riverside, Burlington County.

A judge overturned the Hazleton ordinance, ruling it unconstitutional, and Riverside rescinded its ordinance, with officials saying the town could not afford the legal costs of defending it.

Flor Gonzalez, head of the Latin American Coalition in Plainfield, worries that her city may become the latest battleground in the nationwide debate over immigration. She says the suit comes as tensions over the city's large immigrant population have been rising to a boil, with police ticketing day laborers, a recent spate of beatings and robberies of immigrants, and raids by federal immigration officials.

"This is the worst it's been. There is a lot of unfriendliness and disrespect against immigrants, and a lot has been happening quietly," Gonzalez said. "We need big help in this town."

Plainfield City Council President Harold Gibson said that he was unaware of the lawsuit but that city officials had been trying to address concerns over immigration. He cited as an example the city's efforts to find a solution to the situation with day laborers that respects their right to look for work while addressing quality-of-life concerns.

"I think that the people in Plainfield, in terms of the City Council and the general population, they frown on illegal immigration, they don't want undocumented persons living in the town, generally speaking," he said. "However, my position is that I don't think we should set ourselves up as an immigration authority in terms of people who come from other countries and work hard to better themselves and help their families."

The Plainfield suit was filed against Connolly Properties on behalf of a former Connolly employee and two tenants who are U.S. citizens. The tenants allege they were steered into buildings occupied by illegal immigrants who were too afraid about their legal status to complain about decrepit conditions, according to Mike Hethmon, a lawyer for the group that filed the suit.

Connolly Properties has at least 45 rental complexes in northern New Jersey and Allentown.

Ron Simoncini, a spokesman for Connolly Properties, said company officials were bewildered as to why they had been targeted in a federal civil Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act lawsuit. He said he could not comment further before filing a response to the lawsuit.

Hethmon said his group decided to take on the case as part of its strategy of "attrition through enforcement," or urging illegal immigrants to leave the country by making it harder for them to find employment and housing in the United States.

"We have felt for a long time that the racketeering statute would be useful in dealing with situations where businesses and commercial enterprises were heavily involved with illegal immigration," Hethmon said. "We've also felt that individual citizens, communities, neighborhoods, and law-abiding small businesses have always needed tools with which they can defend themselves against the harmful effects of illegal immigration."

Using anti-racketeering laws to prosecute landlords is a legal strategy that immigration experts say they expect to be tried in other parts of the nation.

"I think it's a new tactic, because some of the other things haven't worked," said Donald W. Benson, a lawyer with the labor law firm Littler Mendelson, who has been tracking the use of RICO laws in immigration cases. "Congress couldn't reach a consensus to reform the immigration laws, states are trying to fill in the gaps and they're having varied success, and local groups are trying to work through local ordinances, so it's just one part of a much bigger picture of immigration struggles in the U.S."

RICO was designed to prosecute organized crime and was initially used to go after the Mafia and white-collar criminal syndicates. The law was expanded in 1996 to include immigration-related provisions, making things like human trafficking and harboring and smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States punishable felonies.

Now, lawyers in the Plainfield case - and in a few other cases where employers have been sued under RICO for hiring undocumented workers - are arguing that RICO should be more broadly interpreted to include those who hire or rent housing to illegal immigrants.

Benson said that most of the attempts to use RICO in this way have been dismissed by judges in the preliminary stages, but that they were slowly gaining some traction, with one case reaching the settlement stage.

Immigrant advocates in Plainfield said they are concerned that a national anti-illegal immigration group has their city on its radar.