ICE access to utility data could lead to a housing crisis
What happens if you’re afraid to sign up for water or gas or electricity?
As recently as last October, it was impossible for undocumented immigrants living in LaGrange, Georgia to sign up for water, electricity, gas, sanitation, and other essential utility services. The city government is the sole provider of utilities for its thirty thousand residents, but applications for service required a Social Security number and government-issued photo ID, neither of which undocumented people are eligible to obtain in the state. LaGrange agreed to accept other forms of identification in response to a lawsuit claiming that this policy violated the federal Fair Housing Act — a law prohibiting housing discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. The plaintiffs made their case: a utilities access problem is a housing problem.
This argument put forth by the Georgia Conference of the NAACP and the advocacy group Project South may now be relevant on a national scale. Just months after LaGrange allowed undocumented residents to apply for utility services, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent letters to data giants Equifax and Thomson Reuters demanding answers about the companies’ role in supplying Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with millions of customer records from water, gas, electricity, phone, cable, and other utility providers. Utility bills are a likely source of a person’s most up-to-date address, and newly surfaced documents show an immigration officer citing them to learn that a target has “recently departed” from a location.
When ICE agents can search through water and electricity records to aid immigration enforcement efforts, this means that even if all “no papers, no service” policies like the one in LaGrange were overturned by the handful of jurisdictions that continue to have them in place, the fear of deportation could still be enough to jeopardize access to utilities — and to safe, dignified housing — for undocumented people living across the country.
Details about how ICE uses utility data are only beginning to come to light, but the possibility that this information could be used to aid deportations may be enough to deter many households from signing up for services altogether. If this happens, we could see nationwide what we’ve already seen in LaGrange: without a secure way to access water and other utilities, residents enter precarious housing arrangements with substandard living conditions, pushing them and their families onto long-term tracks of insecurity and displacement.
What happens if you are afraid to sign up for water or gas or electricity? How and where and with whom will you live?
For many people, one option is to obtain services under someone else’s name — that of a landlord, for example. But not all landlords are willing to hold utility accounts for their tenants, and searching for one can squeeze out other critical housing considerations, such as rent affordability, workplace proximity, and whether the space is large enough and the neighborhood safe enough for a family to live.
Many renters who go this route end up paying higher prices to occupy lower-quality properties in worse-off neighborhoods, a trend which can contribute to historical patterns of housing segregation. In LaGrange, for instance, the housing options available were often concentrated in areas with higher crime rates — a common proxy for other forms of disadvantage, like lower incomes and poorer schools. One resident of a mobile home where utilities were kept in the landlord’s name also testified that the property was dilapidated, the heater rarely worked, and that the home was infested with pests.
Relying on friends or family instead of landlords for assistance can be equally problematic. In some jurisdictions, obtaining utilities under someone else’s name can put both parties at risk of prosecution. Residents can move in with a friend or relative able to secure services for the entire household, but this arrangement, in addition to placing similar constraints on location and mobility, can also lead to conditions of overcrowding.
The situation is likely even more dire for a community’s most vulnerable members, who may lack strong support networks or the financial means necessary to relocate. In LaGrange, people desperate for housing have been known to go without utilities altogether, sometimes for months at a time. Immediate health and safety concerns aside, discontinuing utility services can violate the terms of a lease, making it a potential cause for eviction. A single eviction on record is enough to bar families from finding decent housing in the future, setting off a chain of events in which people might lose their jobs, leave their neighborhoods, and uproot their lives.
In this year alone, we have seen firsthand the devastation of communities going without air conditioning in record-shattering heat waves that arrived just months after winter storms left millions without electricity and water. If lawmakers don’t act to protect customers’ utility data from being shared with immigration enforcement, barriers to these basic services for undocumented people could last long after the season. And the local story of immigrants seeking water and power in one Georgia town could end up foretelling a housing crisis on the national stage.
Nina Wang is a policy associate with the Center. You can follow her on Twitter.
