Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration is turning its focus to resettling asylum-seekers amid an ongoing humanitarian crisis that’s seen thousands of new arrivals since last August.
As it looks to eventually find more permanent solutions than the police station lobbies and large congregate shelters that have housed migrants in recent months, the city is preparing to seek proposals for a community-based model that could also cut down on current high costs of contractual shelter staff, Johnson deputy chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas told the Tribune.
The city is also eyeing a $25 million expenditure, with state assistance, to provide six months of rental assistance for more than 6,500 migrants, plus $15 million to fight homelessness. But she emphasized that the city’s plans in collaboration with the county and state remain fluid as the administration struggles to build capacity to provide immediate support for the migrants arriving in Chicago daily.
“You can characterize our strategy as ultimately resettlement,” Pacione-Zayas said. But it is not a problem that will be resolved in a period of weeks, she added.
The city also wants the federal government to find a faster way to provide work permits for the migrants so that they can support themselves after the six-month rental assistance ends. Pacione-Zayas said there have been discussions at the state level with some national employer organizations, in attempts to find a more immediate solution.
“Let’s be real. We know that folks are going to need some way to sustain after the rental assistance expires,” she said.
To be sure, the city’s challenges are immense. Shelters are still at capacity, which has led to migrants sleeping on the floors at police stations and struggling to gather resources. Moving asylum-seekers to large congregate settings has also been fraught in some cases with both resistance from existing residents and reports of overcrowding, bad food and otherwise poor conditions.
But Pacione-Zayas said the city is working closely with state and county officials “to do the work so we don’t just talk about it.”
Chicago and Illinois leaders have long blasted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for busing migrants to Chicago because it bills itself a sanctuary city. More than 10,000 asylum-seekers have arrived in Chicago since the first buses showed up last summer. But Pacione-Zayas took a longer view in sizing up the crisis.
“In many ways this is the chickens coming home to roost in terms of failed U.S. foreign policy and what has historically happened in Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of destabilizing governments and economies, which then has you pushing people toward the United States to flee their countries because of the conditions and seek different outcomes,” she said.
Efforts to resettle some of the migrants from city-run shelters to more permanent homes began in April, when the Department of Housing allocated $4 million for the program dubbed Asylum Seeker Emergency Rental Assistance. So far, 109 households have been resettled into permanent housing, and 285 currently have signed leases or are in the process of moving within the next 15 to 30 days, Pacione-Zayas said.
The Illinois Housing Development Authority has been in charge of processing the applications, while Catholic Charities does the case management and New Life has been subcontracted to help the migrants move into their apartments.
But while City Hall talks about increased collaboration with outside groups, the reality on the ground has been far from cordial, some volunteers say.
In recent days, volunteers reported that city-contracted security staffers threatened, harassed and then called the police on them while they were serving food to asylum-seekers outside a shelter at the YMCA in West Ridge. Pacione-Zayas said Friday an investigation had been launched.
Other volunteers attempting to help people housed at a Leone Beach Park shelter wrote to local aldermen in May that the staff there “has been at best, discouraging of our efforts, and at worst openly hostile.”
The asylum-seeker shelters are staffed day and night by Favorite Staffing, a contracted vendor that works to support management operations, according to a statement from the city. But the staffing model established by the former administration is not sustainable, Pacione-Zayas said. Of the $51 million that the City Council approved for migrant care expenditures through June, $47 million is going to pay for the contractual staff.
“What we learned, and what was very troublesome because it is not sustainable, is that the staffing of our shelters has been done by contractual staff,” she said. “And in many ways these are the same staff that had staffed up health care spaces during COVID. They’re incredibly expensive. They’re national staffing companies. And it is not sustainable to move forward. That is not something we should continue to justify.”
The city will seek proposals for community-based providers either to staff shelters or to have volunteer-led shelters “deputized to be a delegate agency,” Pacione-Zayas said.
The city is aiming for a shelter staff that’s “culturally congruent, linguistically responsive and trauma informed,” she said. “And we want to make sure that the investment that we are making go into the pockets of Chicagoans.”
Erendira Rendon, vice president of immigrant justice at the Resurrection Project, a community-based organization has been at the forefront of welcoming asylum-seekers and advising city leaders on their response, said she welcomes the new administration’s approach.
Rendon said local community organizations can provide more holistic support to migrants arriving versus temporary staffing agencies, which is how the shelters are operated now.
Though the staff is effective with day-to-day operations and helps to facilitate translation services, “what we really need is community organizers in the shelters assisting with the staffing so that, aside from providing support with day to day, (they) can also provide support with learning how navigate the immigration system, how to use public transportation, learning about their rights if they choose to work, given that they are very vulnerable community,” Rendon said.
Earlier this month, Pacione-Zayas met with several community leaders, including the Janet Murguia, the president of Unidos US, formerly National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Latino nonprofit advocacy organization, to discuss how community organizations could work together to better assess and help asylum-seekers to fully resettle in the city.
Murguia said that what Chicago is experiencing is a result of the humanitarian crisis that is stemming from a broken asylum system.
“We’ve argued for coordinated federal, state and local strategy to address these issues. But the bottom line is that the state and the cities need more resources,” Murguia said. “We would go even further and have advocated that we need more funding to support community-based organizations who are on the front lines providing help with limited resources.”
She said many of the affiliated organizations in Chicago are highly experienced and trusted by the asylum-seeker community.
“They bring language and cultural competency to help support and transition these families” she added.
Meanwhile, the arrivals have not stopped.
Though buses from the border have slowed now, according to Pacione-Zayas, at its height five weeks ago, 70 to 100 migrants arrived each day. Now that number is closer to 35.
But there are still hundreds of new arrivals each week, she said, overcrowding the 12 city-run temporary shelters at different locations across Chicago. They also come by Amtrak and plane, and many arrivals go unreported.
Migrants are dropped off by bus to a landing site at Union Station, or to landing stations at Midway or O’Hare airports, before getting dispersed to shelters based on their individual situations. Families or singles with other critical needs such as pregnancy get priority, according to city spokesperson Mary May.
At a new temporary shelter at Daley College in West Lawn on Thursday evening, seven members of a family from Venezuela sat in a corner of the field against a chain-link fence overlooking West 76th Street. They had just arrived by bus to Union Station that morning and were moved to Daley College a few hours later, they said.
A 38-year-old man in the group said he was a dental technician in his home country, Venezuela. He left because of the corruption and the scarcity of resources, he said. He has a lot of friends who are doctors.
“There is no medication there,” he said. “Everything is scarce. Food, education.”
His 34-year-old wife, 11-year-old daughter and 32-year-old cousin looked through plastic bags of clothes and donations they had picked up from a free box at a parking lot across the street.
The cousin’s 12-year-old and 6–year-old children chased each other and kicked a small plastic soccer ball through the mostly dead grass.
The man said they hadn’t spent very much time inside Daley College because they had gone almost immediately across the street to pick up clothes when they heard there was a donation box. He estimated there were more than 500 people inside, but hadn’t been there long enough to comment on the conditions of the shelter.
“Pass it here! Here!” his son gleefully shouted to the other two children.
The family spent almost two months walking and taking trains to get to the U.S. Like many, they hope to get in touch with an immigration lawyer, to find housing, to continue in the same line of work.
“Venimos de un mundo de corrupción,” the man said. “We come from a world of corruption.”
He said he felt he was trapped in Venezuela. For his kids especially, he said, it was no way to live.
His daughter picked out a pink doll from a bag they had been using to collect the free donations. She hugged it close and smiled.
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