William D. Lopez is a clinical assistant professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He is also the author of Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. The critically acclaimed work, set in Michigan’s Washtenaw County, details the terrible strain that immigration raids place on Latinx communities—and the families and friends who must deal with their extensive fallout. To help mark Hispanic Heritage Month, Mr. Lopez sat with us for an interview. 

Do you do anything special to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month? 

In my house, not specifically. As a Latino, the father to two multi-racial Latino children and the child of an immigrant mother, I like to think the culture that shaped my life is something that is constantly in the foreground. In my house, we try to integrate cultural pride into the books we read, the movies we watch, and in the stories, we tell each other, 12 months of the year.  

What do you think about the term Hispanic? 

Ha, great question. When I was growing up in Texas, my mom, born in Mexico, used the term Mexican. I remember discussing when and who got to use “American.” As I grew older, I started referring to myself as Hispanic, then Latino. I haven’t adopted Latinx in every setting, but my daughter has! How we describe ourselves is part of an ongoing, constant discussion shaped by our collective resistance and creativity. It’s critical to keep refining the terms that define and sustain us. But, at the same time, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is going to use the same system and tools to oppress us regardless of how we qualify ourselves. So we also have to remember to work against the policies that target us no matter how we identify.  

What’s your thumbnail description of Separated? 

It is a book that chronicles the aftereffects from a single ICE raid in Washtenaw County. By following the ripple effects of what happens in the lives of those who’ve been affected by them, I wanted to force us to think about the broad impacts of how these raids affect not just the people caught up in them, but also their families and the communities they live in. 

What motivated you to write it? 

A good mix of anger and rage at the oppressive and violent systems that are operating in my community are probably good starting points. But anger and rage are not very sustainable. So, I’d say I’m also motivated by my love for the people I see dealing with state-sponsored oppression, and the creativity and resilience they show in the face of that. I wanted to show what people are able to achieve beyond merely surviving. This is story worth telling, and to be in position to be able to tell it is really an honor. I couldn’t imagine anything more rewarding as a career. 

One reviewer of wrote: “Lopez's book is one of the most powerful examples to date of an academic using deep study and radical empathy to indict a profoundly evil system.” How does it feel to receive a review like that? 

I loved that review. What I like about particularly is the phrase “radical empathy.” A lot of times as an academic, you are told that you have to be “objective” and remove emotion from your work. But we don’t function as strictly intellectual or emotional beings. The secret to moving forward as researchers and activists is finding the intersection of those two aspects of ourselves, to bring and merge both our empathy and emotion and our intellect. That’s how I approached this, so it feels great to hear that the story you’ve told is one that people are learning from. 

What is one thing you would like for non-Hispanics to think about as we mark this month? 

On the one hand, I would like the contributions of our broader culture to be in the foreground. Our music, our literature, our art. I’d like to see that all celebrated. On the other hand, I’d like for people to remind folks of the racial profiling that targets my community, and other communities. People need to be aware that forces are at work actively trying to remove large portions of a community whose culture we are celebrating. If we don’t reflect on that, I don’t think the purpose of this month is really being served. Don’t listen to our music and eat our food and remove our families.  

Are there any points we didn’t talk about that you’d like to raise? 

Yes. I’m very excited about the next generation of folks doing this work. They seem to automatically take a much more intersectional approach by pushing the boundaries of are what traditionally thought of as Latinx communities to create a future where there is even more Black and Brown solidarity. 

For more than a year, Detroiter Theodore Rice has been in court battling to remain in the place he’s called home for more than a quarter century. As a result, he’s seen firsthand how crucial it is for people facing eviction to have legal representation when going up against a property owners experienced in using the judicial system to their advantage.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing moratorium on evictions, about 30,000 Detroit households a year faced the threat of eviction. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ended the moratorium, there is an urgent need for the City of Detroit to help people in immediate danger of being forced from their homes.

People like Theodore Rice.

When Rice lost his home to tax foreclosure in 2017, an investor purchased it through the county’s annual property auction, then offered a deal he said would allow Rice to remain in the house. Rice, who is Black, says he was duped into believing he was buying back the property on a land contract, paying $500 each month with the goal of eventually reclaiming ownership. Unbeknownst to Rice, the document he signed offered no more protection than a standard lease. 

A self-employed carpenter and auto mechanic, work began drying up for Rice last year as the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread. As a result, he was unable to make the monthly payments.

The owner of the property quickly filed court papers to have Rice evicted, and kept pressing the case even though the moratorium was in place. Like many landlords, he wanted to pave the way for eviction to occur quickly once the federal moratorium ended.

Severely damaged by an electrical fire that destroyed part of the roof several years ago, the house is really not fit to live in.

Rice was able to connect with Vanessa Fluker, a Detroit attorney who specializes in representing people facing eviction. Having her at his side, in a case that remains ongoing, has given Rice hope, and a fighting chance against a property owner whose companies have taken hundreds of renters to court.

“I know right from wrong, but I don’t know the law," Rice said. "And unless you have someone representing you who does know the law, and how courts operate, the average person doesn’t stand a chance.”

He’s absolutely correct. Which is why, in cities and states across America, momentum is building for a movement known as "right to counsel," or RTC. So far, 10 cities and three states have implemented some form of RTC.

Just as indigent people are provided attorneys at no cost if charged in a criminal matter, low-income people need representation in civil cases involving something as disruptive and harmful to a family’s wellbeing as an eviction.

Renters living on low incomes seldom have the resources to pay for an attorney, unlike the vast majority of landlords. Of the approximately 30,000 eviction cases filed in Detroit’s 36th District Court in 2017, landlords had legal representation 83% of the time; that same year, fewer than 5% of renters had an attorney, according to Detroit’s United Community Housing Coalition, a nonprofit that provides legal help to people on low incomes at risk of losing their homes.

Not surprisingly, that sort of tilted playing field leads to drastically disparate outcomes.

As the Center for American progress has reported, two eviction-prevention pilot programs in Boston provide clear evidence of the huge difference having a lawyer makes in eviction proceedings: two-thirds of the tenants provided legal representation were able to retain their homes, while two-thirds of those without lawyers were evicted.

Like so many of this country’s problems, racism and income inequality are significant factors.

“Due to decades of inequalities in our housing system, communities of color and low-income women feel the impacts of eviction the most — Black women in particular,” according to the national ACLU. “Black women are more than twice as likely to have evictions filed against them as white people," according to the national ACLU. "Less than half of Black and Latinx families own their homes compared to 73% of white families. Black and Latinx tenants are also twice as likely as white tenants to report that they have little to no ability to make rent each month.”

Because people of color are disproportionately affected, the problem is particularly acute in Detroit, a city that is nearly 80% Black with a poverty rate that tops 30%, making it the second most impoverished city in America.

Once a national leader in Black homeownership, a majority of Detroit residents now live in rental properties. That, combined with high poverty rates, results in a shocking number of evictions. In 2016, for example, there were 6,664 evictions in Detroit, according to researchers at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. That amounts to more than 18 families losing their homes every single day.

“When a person has to go down to the 36th District Court, when they risk losing their home, their place in the neighborhood, their child’s spot at school, and so many other things are on the line, that person should not have to walk into court alone," Tonya Meyers Phillips, director of Community Partnerships & Development at Detroit’s Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice, said during an online forum hosted by the newly formed group Detroit Right to Counsel. "If an individual cannot afford legal representation, then legal representation should be provided for them."

That coalition, which includes the ACLU of Michigan, the United Community Housing Coalition, Michigan Legal Services and other organizations, is asking the city to implement a plan that will provide attorneys for 20% of individuals facing evictions each year for the next five years at a cost of $4 million dollars.

For those who might question whether this is a wise use of public funds, it is important to consider the other side of that equation: What is the cost of doing nothing, to residents, neighborhoods, and the city as a whole?

The short answer to that question is that the cost of inaction is massive, both in terms of dollars as well as human suffering.

The economic and social benefits of providing an eviction right to counsel in Detroit include:

• Reduced blight as more homes remain legally occupied
• Reduced costs incurred by the city of Detroit for homeless outreach
• Reduced costs for emergency shelters, rapid rehousing and emergency rental assistance.
• Reduced policing costs related to squatting and criminalizing homelessness 
• Reduced costs associated with education instability and employment instability
• Reduced costs associated physical and mental health care emergency services
• Reduced population and tax base
• Increased stability for families, schools, and neighborhoods.

If those sorts of factors are considered, RTC turns out to be remarkably cost effective. A study done for The Philadelphia Bar Association found that $3.5 million spent on eviction representation would save the city $45.2 million in shelter costs, health care costs and mental health costs — a return on investment of $12 for every $1 spent on Right to Counsel. 

For Detroit to realize those benefits, and to avoid the trauma and hardship evictions create for families, the city must act quickly to provide legal representation for people on low incomes facing eviction. 

As for Theodore Rice, he’s struggling to deal with the dread of what could happen now that the moratorium has ended.

“I can’t sleep at all, I’m worrying so much,” he says. “But at least I’m able have some hope, because I’m not facing this alone. I have someone who knows the system standing beside me, and fighting for me. I don’t even want to think what it would be like if that weren’t the case."

Read the full story on the Detroit Free Press.

I remember listening to my father’s small black radio, tuned to NPR, as I got ready for my journalism classes on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

That morning, longtime anchor Bob Edwards interrupted the broadcast: Two planes had crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. As chaos and confusion erupted globally, I was filled with panic. In those first moments, I could not have imagined the sorrow and betrayal of suspicion that would follow Muslim communities nor the love and resilience that we would nurture for ourselves.

On that morning, I ran out of the house, hair still wet, heart racing. Soon we would learn that four planes were deliberately crashed, brutally killing thousands. Through guttural sobs, I vacillated between the questions “why” and “who,” fearing the possibility that these horrific acts were committed in the name of my religion. 

Within minutes of arriving at Wayne State University, my favorite professor locked eyes with me as my classmates shuffled out when she announced that class was cancelled. She demanded that I, the only Muslim in class, head home immediately for my own safety. Her fear for me and my family was palpable.

It was in that moment that everything changed — brown eyes looking back at me, pleading for me to protect my family. 

NPR blared through my speakers as I drove home to Dearborn. An ominous quiet had settled onto our streets, yet inaccurate news reports of Muslims dancing and celebrating in Dearborn aired on reputable news outlets without confirmation or correction. 

This quiet was only interrupted by newly raised American flags snapping in the wind in the hopes of communicating the depth of our pain as Americans in a city that we had built for ourselves. The Arabic calligraphy of shop signs that danced elegantly alongside the English text would now appear as crosshairs for the media, anti-Muslim zealots and law enforcement officials who would descend onto our city.  

I wish that our fears had been unfounded, had emerged only after hate incidents permeated our communities, or had subsided as calls for unity were noted.

Instead, the fear was constant. In those first hours, my mother called my sister and warned her to remove the misbaha, or prayer beads, from her car as she drove home.

My neighbor, a white man in his perpetual 60s, warned that he liked my mother even though she’s a Muslim, but others would not be so kind.

Later, a newspaper publisher would tell me that I was hired as an intern because he wanted someone on the “inside” if there was another terrorist attack. “The inside of what?” I thought, but didn’t ask the question, hoping ignorance would save me from the indignity of the answer.  

Yet the indignities were inevitable.

Within days, the all-consuming fear turned into an aching knowing of what was to come — the U.S. government began to almost immediately subjugate Muslims at home and abroad in my name. To be clear, anti-Muslim sentiment did not start on Sept. 11, 2001. Muslims in America, especially Black Muslims, have long been crushed by the weight of government surveillance, targeting and discrimination. 

And yet, in the days and weeks after 9/11, a shroud of secrecy enveloped this nation that has yet to be completely lifted.

We were changed; I was changed.

It was this reality that forced me to abandon journalism for civil rights activism, eventually joining the ACLU's communications department 15 years ago. I could no longer simply tell stories of our harm. I wanted to change our reality.

We wouldn’t know, at first, the extent to which the U.S. government would launch its own brand of blood-revenge — extrajudicial killings, torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay and CIA blacksites later recognized for their inhumane treatment. We wouldn’t know for years to come what men like Binyam Mohamed, Khalid El-Masri, Mohamedou Ould Salahi and countless others would suffer at the hands of our government in dark corners of the globe.

And on U.S. soil, panicked and helpless families looked for their fathers, uncles, sons and brothers — our community members who were disappeared, held for days, weeks and months by the federal government in undisclosed locations, thousands later deported.

Immigration judges would unsuccessfully attempt to close hearings to the public and to the press. Five thousand additional Muslim men would be targeted for surprise visits from the FBI, under the guise that answering questions was voluntary.

To read the article from the Detroit Free Press, click here.