“We will no longer be a party to something that’s so unjust,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in a news conference on Wednesday.
Chicago’s Daily Herald reports that Dart cited the “economic crisis” as the reason he has called a halt to evictions until lenders can prove the foreclosed home’s occupant has been notified.
“We have to be sure that when we are doing this – and we are destroying some people’s lives – we better be darned sure we’re talking about the right people,” Dart was quoted saying in the AP story.
Dart explained that he ordered his deputies to stop evicting people from homes in foreclosure because many of the people ordered evicted are renters who have paid their rent and have done nothing wrong. He explained that tenants with their rent fully paid, go to work in the morning and then return to discover they have been evicted. The authorities cart the possessions of renters of foreclosed homes out to the curbside and by the time they return home, everything has disappeared.
“The meager possessions they have are gone,” he said. “This is happening too often.”