If Mayor Brandon Johnson really wants to get a handle on the mounting migrant crisis in Chicago, he can start by scrapping his plan to visit the nation’s southern border to get an alleged “firsthand” look at the issue.
That’s because Chicagoans already know what’s happening down there: a humanitarian emergency is being politically exploited by a Republican governor (and GOP leaders) who would rather callously send asylum-seekers to big cities with Democratic mayors than work with President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to fix the issue.
So what’s a mayor to do?
Stay in Chicago and get to work solving the defining issue of his administration.
And there’s more than enough here to keep Johnson and his administration occupied.
Contract with a sketchy firm, ‘dialogue’ with faith institutions
More than 17,000 asylum seekers have been sent to Chicago from the country’s southern border since the summer of 2022.
About half of the arrivals are housed in temporary shelters run by the city. But at least 2,500 are living — if you can call it that — in police station lobbies and floor space at O’Hare and Midway airports.
Given the pace of the arrivals, we can understand if the city was caught flat-footed momentarily and had to scramble for space while a larger plan was being developed.
But we see no evidence of a solid, workable plan forthcoming from the five-month-old Johnson administration. The Fifth Floor’s big idea so far is awarding a $29 million contract to private security firm GardaWorld to create and manage tent camps this winter for up to 1,400 migrants.
Tent camps in a Chicago winter are a bad idea on its face, but that’s not the only problem. GardaWorld had been in line for a $40 million contract to build a similar camp in Denver, but officials there gave the company the boot last May, citing abuse allegations against the corporation and its thin experience with housing migrant populations.
And as the Sun-Times’ David Roeder wrote Monday, the city seems to have left the Roman Catholic archdiocese and other religious organizations — many of which own scores of properties that likely could be converted into housing — idling on the sidelines.
“Representatives of the Archdiocese have walked through many properties with the City over the last year, across both administrations, none of which have ultimately been selected,” a representative told Roeder via email. “We continue in those dialogues.”
Those dialogues need to bear fruit, and quickly.
“I recognize what our southern states are dealing with,” Johnson said. So he wants to “see it firsthand.”
But with all that needs to happen here, the mayor even talking about a trip to the border is senseless.
And useless. New York Mayor Eric Adams traveled to Mexico and Latin America last week under a similar pretext. His message while there — “Our hearts are endless, but our resources are not” — was hardly worth the trip and could have been delivered easier and cheaper from a desk at Gracie Mansion.
‘This is serious’
The Biden administration deserves a measure of blame for this. Their relative inaction has resulted in mayors wanting to play diplomat, a job for which Johnson, Adams and most mayors are hardly suited.
“We need to go assess the situation,” Johnson said. “This is serious. And I’ve been saying it. I mean this ain’t the first time you’ve heard me say how serious this dynamic is.”
With double-digit busloads of migrants now arriving in Chicago daily — and that amount will likely only increase as the city’s hosting of the Democratic National Convention approaches next year —Johnson has to show leadership, here.
He doesn’t need to travel any farther south than the city’s border at 138th Street to do so.
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