Cook County Resumes Foreclosure Evictions

By Prescott Carlson in News on Nov 21, 2010 5:00PM

Now that Tom Dart has quashed his aspirations to become mayor of Chicago, it's back to business at the Cook County Sheriff's office, and at the top of Dart's to-do list is booting folks out of their foreclosed homes.

Dart had halted foreclosure evictions in October tied to several of the areas largest mortgage holders, saying that the financial institutions did not have much of their paperwork in proper order, and were not properly scrutinizing each foreclosure case. It was the second time in two years that Dart had stopped evictions.

But unfortunately for those former homeowners down on their luck, Dart appears to have overstepped the bounds of his office. According to the Associated Press, Dart said Friday that Cook County prosecutors demanded he resume the evictions, saying that he was "legally bound to carry out foreclosure eviction orders signed by a judge." But that doesn't mean Dart is done with his fight, saying:

"For the people who have been involved with this and think now that because the [Cook County] State's Attorney's office has ordered me to go ahead with the evictions that everything's fine... No, we are going to be looking at [bank employees] for criminal violations. You may have got through one storm now, the other one is coming."

Dart added that investigators "continue to find problems" with bank paperwork, and that his halt on evictions highlighted that the problems "were even more widespread than he first thought."