"Those are the hard days," said Cohen, a mild-mannered man with crinkly eyes and an easy laugh who is unfailingly courteous to everyone he encounters.
The pair set out from the West Covina courthouse before 8 a.m. on a recent Friday with 25 evictions scheduled.
Twelve were canceled before deputies started because the occupants agreed at the last minute to leave on their own.
That left 13 residences from which the deputies would have to be prepared to physically remove people. In most cases, it turned out that they had already gone but that no one had notified the Sheriff's Department.
At only one stop did Cohen and Munoz have to remove someone.
Shortly after 9 a.m. they discovered Andres Enciso sleeping on the floor of a home on Northam Street in La Puente.
Enciso, who appeared terrified and confused, ran out of his house carrying a bundle of blankets, then ran back in because he had forgotten the family's pet, a pit bull. He spoke only Spanish, which neither Munoz nor Cohen speaks well. In bits and pieces, Enciso told the deputies he had been moving his family out when he fell asleep. He said he was a renter -- and his landlord had not said anything about the house being in foreclosure.
It was a situation Munoz and Cohen have encountered before: The owner stops paying the mortgage but keeps collecting rent and does not tell the tenants they are about to face the Sheriff's Department.
With mounting numbers of foreclosures, the problem has become so common that Los Angeles late last year passed a city ordinance limiting bank evictions of tenants and requiring payment of relocation fees to those forced out.
But renters living outside the city of Los Angeles have little protection, and tenant advocates say they are increasingly seeing families who had moved in just days or weeks before deputies showed up to remove them, losing their deposits and rental payments in the process.
Cohen and Munoz said they try to be compassionate.
A week earlier, he said, they arrived at a foreclosed home and found an elderly woman who seemed to need medical care.
"We just said, 'We can't do it,' " he said of that eviction, noting that he and his partner called the county's Adult Protective Services to help the woman.
In another recent case, Cohen arrived at a duplex where one family had been given permission to stay for a few days while another, with young children, had been ordered out. He talked to the bank's lawyer and said both families should be given the same treatment.
