Illinois Sheriff Suspends Evictions

Sheriff Thomas J. Dart made himself a hero on Wednesday by doing the right thing. It’s his job to evict people from foreclosed homes, and lately, he’s been evicting renters whose landlords have lost the property they rent. As of Wednesday in Cook County Illinois (Chicago and environs), he’s halting eviction actions.

Legally, the mortgage company is supposed to find out who is living in a house before getting an eviction order. Often, the company does no such thing. As a result, says the sheriff, “These poor people are seeing everything they own put out on the street. ... They've paid their bills, paid them on time. Here we are with a battering ram at the front door going to throw them out. It’s gotten insane.”

The Illinois Bankers Association is having a fit. It stated, “The reality is that by ignoring the law and his legal responsibilities, he is carrying out ‘vigilantism’ at the highest level of an elected official. The Illinois banking industry is working hard to help troubled homeowners in many ways, but Sheriff Dart's declaration of 'marshal law' should not be tolerated.” It also noted, the sheriff “was elected to uphold the law and to fulfill the legal duties of his office, which include serving eviction notices.”

The sheriff is having none of it. “I think the outrage on my part with them [is] that they could so cavalierly issue documents and have me throw people out of homes who have done absolutely nothing wrong,” Sheriff Dart said. “They played by all the rules,” and wind up with nowhere to live.

He faults the laziness of the bankers. He said, “I told them, ‘You send an agent out, you send somebody out that gives me any type of assurance that the appropriate person is in the house, I will fulfill the order.’ When you’re blindly sending me out to houses where I’m coming across innocent tenant after innocent tenant, I can’t keep doing this and have a good conscience about it.”

He also said, “This is an example where the banking industry has not done any of the work they should do. It’s a piece of paper to them. These mortgage companies . . . don’t care who’s in the building. They simply want their money and don’t care who gets hurt along the way. On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.”

The slogan for the day is “Re-Elect Sheriff Thomas J. Dart.”

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