Minneapolis renters seek more time to pay rent after immigration crackdown

Tenants behind on rent in Minneapolis are asking for more time to pay their landlords after a record deployment of federal immigration agents forced thousands of renters to shelter in place.

On Tuesday, March 3, the Minneapolis Committee of the Whole voted to advance an ordinance that would extend the Rental Pre-Eviction Notification Ordinance to 60 days.

Council members Aurin Chowdhury, Aisha Chughtai, Elliott Payne, Robin Wonsley, Jamal Osman, Soren Stevenson and Jason Chavez voted to extend the notification period. Council members Michael Rainville, LaTrisha Vetaw, Pearl Warren and Elizabeth Shaffer voted against the resolution. Council Member Jamison Whiting abstained.

The current requirement, which took effect last year, mandates landlords give renters 30 days’ written notice before filing an eviction complaint in housing court. Advocates say that window — once just 14 days — is no longer sufficient in the wake of Operation Metro Surge.

“Extending the notice period risks unintended consequences,” said Cathy Bennett, executive director of the Twin Cities Housing Alliance. “It places additional strain on housing providers who are still recovering.”

But for every housing policy executive testifying about “unintended consequences,” there were scores of people like Kadirjah Warsama.

Warsama, a small business owner at Karmel Mall — the city’s largest East African shopping center — told reporters that stores are already 90 days behind on rent, have maxed out their credit cards and dipped into their children’s tuition funds just to cover costs.

“We are asking you — 30 days is not enough time to apply for rental assistance. We need 60 days, and 60 days is even a bare minimum,” Warsama said through a translator.

She said fear of immigration enforcement has effectively shuttered much of the foot traffic the mall depends on.

“There are more than 700 businesses that are now not able to pay their rent because people are afraid to go and shop. And now Eid is coming, and a lot of those businesses are going to be locked out,” Warsama said. “So this has been affecting the Somali American communities.”

Twin Cities Tenant Union organizer Mina Bravan said the group voted unanimously against authorizing a rent strike after organizers concluded they had not secured enough pledges to sustain one.

But Bravan said the threat alone moved officials.

“We believe that our threat was taken as credible by the mayor and the governor,” she said.

She said Gov. Tim Walz’s team contacted labor partners the day the strike drive was announced. Mayor Jacob Frey’s office contacted union organizers the following day. At the state Legislature, a $50 million rental assistance package died in a House committee, but a $75 million companion bill advanced out of the Senate Housing Committee. Minneapolis committed $1 million and St. Paul roughly $2.8 million in emergency rental assistance last month.

“We have 621 strike pledges. This is far short of our goal. We knew that attempting to reach 10,000 pledges in less than two weeks was really ambitious, but still felt worth it,” Bravan said.

That crisis has a human face.

Mary Alton, a longtime Minneapolis renter waiting on a Social Security determination while her landlord delayed eviction as long as possible, described the moment an eviction notice arrived as a kind of collapse.

“It happened. I was blindsided by it. Reading it, the language was foreign. I didn’t know these words. I didn’t understand it and I was faced with court,” Alton said. “Complicated, of course, by mental health issues, I laid in bed for three days.”

When she finally got up, she started calling agencies for help and hit wall after wall.

“You get answering machines, answering machines and answering machines. And their answering machines say they will get back to you in two or three days. You just keep calling agencies,” Alton said. “And that takes a week and you don’t get calls back.”

Jess Zarik, co-executive director at Homeline, which provides free legal advice to thousands of Minnesota renters each year, said the scale of need is unlike anything the organization has seen.

“Families need money now, but relief funds, whether through mutual aid or city and state allocations, take time to move,” Zarik said. “Mutual aid networks are responding with incredible solidarity, and the scale of need far exceeds what communities alone can cover.”

Zarik said eviction data is still catching up to the scope of the crisis. Statewide, more than 4,300 cases were filed in the first two months of the year. Minneapolis alone saw 435 filings in January and 413 in February as of Feb. 27.

“We know what an eviction filing does — even one filing, regardless of the outcome, could follow a tenant for years and shut them out of future housing,” Zarik said.

Bravan said a friend spent months sheltering indoors, afraid to leave home despite living in the United States legally.

“The rent was due. She had no money, so she risked it,” Bravan said, recounting the moment her friend finally left home.

Her friend was detained anyway, then released without explanation.

“She was detained, she got out, thank God, because they had no reason to hold her except that she was Latino,” Bravan said. “She went home and still doesn’t have money. She cannot pay the rent. What she has told me she needs is time.”

Jessica Szuminski, a policy attorney at the Housing Justice Center, pointed to a risk unique to Minneapolis. Hennepin County is the only courthouse in Minnesota that requires tenants to appear in person for an initial eviction hearing, and federal immigration agents have already made arrests there despite earlier assurances to the chief judge that they would not.

“Temporarily expanding pre-eviction notices to at least 60 days will allow families time to recuperate and gather the funds they need to pay rent and satisfy their landlords,” Szuminski told committee members. “We need to pause evictions to make sure people don’t have to decide between showing up to defend themselves in court or avoiding being kidnapped by ICE.”

Emily Green, a Longfellow resident who launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised $2,000 for 95 families, said the dollars coming in are not keeping pace with the need.

“We had a neighbor reach out early in our fundraising,” Green said. “We didn’t have enough for her in time. She was evicted and is now living with her two children in a shelter.”

The neighbor had asked for $200 — just enough to cover a phone bill.

Not everyone who testified Tuesday supported the extension. Representatives from the Twin Cities Housing Alliance, Agate Housing and Catholic Charities sent a joint letter to the city warning that longer filing periods can push renters deeper into debt.

“Our experience suggests that longer eviction filing periods often result in renters who have missed payments getting further behind,” said Ben Helvick Anderson, vice president of Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative. “We are concerned that extending the notice period may increase the rate of evictions of our most vulnerable households in response to the current crisis.”

The ordinance now heads to a full City Council vote Thursday. If passed and signed by Mayor Frey, it will expire Aug. 31.