“We Just Can’t Get in Front of It”: Is Joe Biden Sleeping on Chicago’s Migrant Crisis?

On a chilly October evening in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood, a large crowd convened in an elementary school auditorium to get the details—and in some cases, air their grievances—about a new temporary migrant shelter that would be established in their west-side community. The walls were lined with murals of dancers and composers like Stephen Foster and Frédéric Chopin—the latter of whom is the namesake of this school, located in a traditionally Eastern European enclave—and the room was full of civic energy. Residents passed around a petition seeking a new police station in the ward to address a recent uptick in crime; one attendee made his way around the auditorium with a flier advertising his plan to house migrants at McCormick Place, the massive convention center on the near South Side. Everything was starting off relatively well-mannered, with words from Alderman Gilbert Villegas and Beatriz Ponce de León, the deputy mayor of immigrant, migrant, and refugee rights under Brandon Johnson—the progressive who took over City Hall in May. “We have not closed our doors the way other cities have,” she said. “We are a welcoming city in a welcoming state.” But it wasn’t long until tension at the town hall began to boil over. “You guys are a bunch of liars!” someone in the crowd shouted, soon after Danny Castaneda, a representative of the city’s Department of Family and Support Services, started to speak. “Lies and lies!” yelled another. “Do we know the criminal backgrounds on these people?” one resident asked the panel of city leaders during an at-times raucous Q&A. “These 200 single men coming into our neighborhood?” ADVERTISEMENT Scenes like this have played out in community forums across the city in recent weeks, as the influx of new migrants—many of whom are being bused in by Texas governor Greg Abbott—has risen dramatically throughout the summer and into the fall. As of this week, Chicago has received more than 440 buses of migrants, 19,000 of whom have settled in the city so far. The city has tried to keep up, but it has struggled: Migrants have been crowded onto the floors of police stations and airports, which are being used as makeshift shelters while migrants await longer-term lodging. They’ve also huddled in tent encampments on the sidewalks—all as local leaders, in and out of government, brace for things to get worse ahead of the Democratic National Convention here next summer. “They’re gonna do everything they can [to plan for an increase in migrants], because this is all political,” as Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, said in August. “They want to make the case that Democratic-led cities are not capable of living up to the values that we have.” $2.50 $1 per month for 1 year + a free tote. Subscribe Now Some Democrats may already be proving Abbott’s point for him: New York mayor Eric Adams has responded to the influx of migrants in New York City with increasingly hard-line border rhetoric. And even President Joe Biden has broken his campaign pledge by resuming construction on part of the border wall and continuing deportations to Venezuela, where the majority of new arrivals have come from. Chicago leaders, by contrast, say they’re trying to hold strong to their commitment as a sanctuary city. “We might be the only welcoming city in the country,” Alderman Andre Vasquez, chair of the city’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told me recently. But the city’s resolve is being stress-tested—not only by Abbott’s inhumane political gamesmanship, but by limited resources and what some describe as long-standing neglect of their communities. And the political implications will go way beyond the Windy City when Biden and national Democrats arrive next August ahead of the 2024 election. By then, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we had 100,000 migrants,” Villegas told me after the town hall, as neighbors mingled outside, some waiting to get a word in with the alderman. 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That the federal government needs to be doing more. “This is really a federal responsibility,” Ponce de León told the crowd on this October evening. “It isn’t fair,” she said, “to put it on cities.” Chicago is currently operating 25 temporary shelters, most of which have been opened since mid-May—about a month after Chicago was named the host city for next year’s Democratic National Convention, and around the same time the Biden administration allowed Donald Trump’s pandemic-era Title 42 border policy to expire. But the current shelters cannot meet the deluge: As of this week, more than 11,000 new arrivals were occupying temporary shelters and more than 3,500 were waiting in police stations and airports for housing, according to city data. Homeless shelters, the city says, have been operating at or near capacity every day. With the weather turning, the city has moved to open more migrant shelters, like the forthcoming facility in Ukrainian Village, which is expected to eventually house up to 200 single adult men—a demographic that figured into numerous residents’ safety concerns. (There have been only a handful of documented safety incidents involving migrants. But there has also been at least one incident of violence against migrants, with a 25-year-old arrested October 11 for allegedly firing on and wounding two outside a police station in the Grand Crossing neighborhood.) Meanwhile, Johnson is moving forward with a plan to establish winterized tent compounds throughout the city. “I don’t think we should continue to look at this as a crisis,” the mayor said as he announced the rollout in September. “This is our reality.” But the plan has been contentious—in part because of allegations of mistreatment and abusive labor practices involving GardaWorld and its subsidiary Aegis Defense Services, the companies Chicago contracted to build the camps. GardaWorld was also one of the companies awarded a contract to help Florida governor Ron DeSantis execute his own migrant-busing program, according to the Tampa Bay Times. (A spokesperson for the security-and-logistics-services company has said that although it was awarded a contract with the state, it was “never activated.” And in a statement to Vanity Fair, GardaWorld said that “we refute all allegations of unsafe practices or neglect in any GardaWorld operations or activities,” adding: “There is a narrative that seems to have been stitched together that either grossly mischaracterizes historical events or falsely attributes them to GardaWorld to begin with.”) Leaders here say they have limited options, due to a lack of coordination and resources from the federal government. Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, a top Biden ally, recently demanded “swift action” from the White House in a call with administration officials. “Illinois stands mostly unsupported against this enormous strain on our state resources,” Pritzker wrote in a subsequent letter to Biden. But there has been little sign that help is on the way: “It’s a test of what a municipal government can try to resolve with limited resources,” says Vasquez. If that’s the case, though, it’s been a “fail across the board,” says Cynthia Nambo, a member of Todo Para Todos—a volunteer group that operated its own migrant shelter from May to September of this year, with a lack of support from the city. Despite high-minded rhetoric from the local, state, and federal governments, Nambo and other mutual aid volunteers say it has mostly fallen to individuals to help welcome migrants with an improvised resettlement effort that is unsustainable in the long term. “It’s almost like your building is flooding and you only have a pail to get the water out,” Nambo told me by phone. The federal government, Nambo says, has been “the most passive and the biggest barrier.” But mutual aid volunteers have also called for more support from the state and local governments. “The entire infrastructure that’s currently in place to respond to people living in police stations right now is an infrastructure that has been established by volunteers,” says Sara Izquierdo, a second-year medical student at University of Illinois Chicago who helped found the Mobile Migrant Health Team—a group providing medical care to new arrivals, who need treatment for everything from the colds that spread in the cramped temporary shelters to injuries they’ve sustained during their journey. “I don’t think that there’s any reason medical students should be leading a health response,” Izquierdo told me. “I would really like to see [the government] take over in a more systematic way.” Yet government at every level seems right now to be overwhelmed by the situation, which has also shined a light on institutional failures—including adequately addressing homelessness and the disinvestment that had beset cities like Chicago well before migrants began arriving in the city. “The South Side has been under-resourced, underfunded for years, for decades,” as one community organizer told ABC 7 at a demonstration last month, accusing leaders of prioritizing the recent migrant crisis while ignoring the “humanitarian crisis” existing residents have endured in some predominantly Black neighborhoods of the city. “How do we get pushed to the back?” Vasquez says the city has an opportunity—to affirm its values in this crisis while addressing the existing “pain” of communities that have been neglected by the city’s power structure for generations. “I think we can reconcile it,” he told me. The challenge, of course, is that the situation continues to escalate, with the city receiving 63 buses in the course of a single week, as Pacione-Zayas said earlier this month. “Even though we are working every single day to open up these shelters,” the mayor’s deputy chief of staff added, “we just can’t get in front of it.” Back at Chopin Elementary, Ponce de León acknowledged that “all of our systems are being stretched.” But she urged there was a “shared responsibility” to maintain Chicago’s status as a “welcoming” city: “All eyes are on Chicago right now.” Some in the packed house welcomed that national gaze. “I would not be standing here if this wasn’t a welcoming city,” one man said during the event, asking how those in the ward could do more to help the new arrivals. But that sentiment wasn’t felt across the board. “We’re doing more than our fair share,” a different resident counterposed later, to an outpour of applause. Last week, a delegation from Chicago traveled to the southern border, carrying with them a warning to migrants that the city is lacking shelter space as temperatures dip. But of course, there’s no telling whether that will deter more migrants from making their way north. “You can tell them whatever you want,” Alderman William Hall told NBC 5. “But they are focused on getting to Chicago, New York, and the lands of other opportunities.” Hall called on the Biden administration to declare Chicago a “disaster zone” in order to open up more federal aid. But with only limited help on the foreseeable horizon, Chicago and other cities may have to meet the moment mostly on their own. “You’re not going to see Chicago turn its back on its values,” Vasquez told me. “We’re going to have to figure out what we need to do. The question is, at what point does the federal government do what’s necessary?” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.