It’s clearer with each passing week that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration is woefully ill-equipped to properly deal with the city’s migrant issue.
If Johnson and his crew aren’t trying to hastily house the asylum-seekers in a tent city built on toxic land in Brighton Park — a bid Gov. J.B. Pritzker rightfully ended earlier this month — then they’re slow on the draw in working with religious organizations with real estate (and willingness) enough to help properly house the new arrivals.
And now a 5-year-old boy, Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero, has died after taking ill in an overcrowded and unsanitary migrant shelter at Halsted Street and Cermak Road in Pilsen.
Four other children and an 18-year-old woman from the facility were hospitalized Monday with fever and vomiting.
This is absolutely unacceptable. And so was Johnson’s tone deaf, deer-in-the-news-camera-lights response Monday to the tragedy in Pilsen.
“I want you to hear me good,” he said. “They’re showing up sick. Do you hear me? They’re showing up sick. The issue isn’t just how we respond in the city of Chicago. It’s the fact we have [Texas Gov. Greg Abbott] placing families on buses without shoes, cold, wet, tired, hungry, afraid, traumatized, and then they come to the city of Chicago, where we have homelessness, [and] mental health clinics that have been shut down and closed.”
All true, yes. But we have a mayor who knew all these things when he ran for office and took the Big Chair on City Hall’s Fifth Floor last May — promising the migrant issue would be properly addressed.
It hasn’t been.
Was help denied?
Jean Carlos’ death is being investigated by police. The Sun-Times reports migrant advocates say the boy died in a bathroom at the shelter after staff refused to call an ambulance.
Although this could not be officially confirmed with police, a law enforcement source told the Sun-Times the boy’s family had previously told shelter staff to leave them alone regarding the sick child.
The source said Jean Carlos died either on his way to the hospital or on arrival. The boy was wearing a face mask, was bleeding from his mouth and nose, and had a fever of more than 100 degrees.
The boy had also suffered for days with diarrhea.
Autopsy results are pending.
The Pilsen shelter is a former warehouse that was pressed into use in early October as housing. With more than 2,000 residents, the shelter is the city’s most crowded.
The facility is operated by Favorite Healthcare Staffing, a Kansas contractor that in September 2022 landed a nearly $100 million deal with the city to run shelters across Chicago.
‘Raggedy and evil’
For its part, the city trumpeted its ability to provide medical care for migrants in shelters, with “thorough health screenings,” weekly shelter visits by health care providers and offering to take new arrivals to Cook County Hospital facilities.
But Johnson and his administration must realize this is not enough.
Fortunately, Chicago has an assortment of partners with which City Hall could work — if only the Johnson administration could be bothered to do so.
The Mobile Migrant Health Team, a volunteer health care organization operated by doctors, medical students and health care workers, has already provided care for thousands of migrants who were housed at police stations.
But when the group offered in November to bring their services to the shelters, they were rebuffed by the city.
According to a screenshot message shared with the Sun-Times, an Office of Emergency Management and Communications official told the organization: “At this time we don’t believe that we will need help in shelters.”
For certain, many of the migrants are being sent to Chicago cold, wet hungry and traumatized as Johnson said.
“They’re just dropping off people anywhere,” Johnson said, referring to Abbott’s migrant busing program. “Do you understand how raggedy and how evil that is?”
We do. But stuffing asylum-seekers into crowded Chicago facilities where potential disease and illness can rapidly spread — all the while turning down offers of medical treatment — is just as bad.
Johnson and his administration must wear the jacket for that.
The mayor seemed to know this when he ran for the office he now holds.
“Doing right by migrants requires good planning … ” Johnson’s extant campaign website says. “Previously, Chicago has bulldozed its way through difficult decisions about migrant resettlement … [W]elcoming migrants into our city with no real plan has left many stranded across Chicago, sleeping on trains and floors.”
The mayor and his people must demand and get answers regarding what happened in Pilsen — and bear the responsibility for fixing the entire migrant settlement effort.
And it’s about more than the dollars and cents of it all. It’s potentially a matter of life and death.
The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.
