Jimena and Kamila Juma, a mother-daughter pair among the most recent migrants to Chicago, arrived in a city whose winter weather was unlike anything they had ever experienced home in Ecuador.
“I was shaking beneath my blankets,” said Kamila Juma, 5, recalling several nights they spent outside the Grand Central District police station, particularly the last — Halloween night — when it snowed.
Luckily, the pair arrived at a station near the church of a local pastor who has pioneered a migrant resettlement program, and the very next day, they and 18 others sleeping outside were moved to a suburban church, where they can expect help with everything from their immigration cases to housing and work.
The expanding church-based resettlement program comes as the city’s resettlement program continues to move slowly, leaving thousands in and around police stations and nearly 12,000 in 24 city shelters.
The Juma’s were moved to the newest church participant in the church resettlement program, Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park.
For now the group is sharing a space in the church basement. But it’s warm and everyone has a cot to sleep on.
Juma, 29, was at a loss for words in describing her luck.
“It’s just so much better, so much better than outside.” she said.
Manfred Karolyi, the pastor overseeing the program at the suburban church, said they planned to host the group for 30 to 60 days and then, if they successfully find housing, welcome another group.
Karolyi said he was partly motivated to help because he’s also an immigrant — from Costa Rica — and, as most of the migrants are Venezuelan, by his own experiences in Venezuela.
The longtime missionary’s journey there in 2016 — a few years into the country’s current crisis — left an impression.
“I’ve seen some of the conditions they’re coming from and why they’re here,” Karolyi said, who volunteered at a hospital in the city of Valencia, Venezuela. “They’re not necessarily pursuing the American dream but just trying to survive and make it somewhere safe for their kids.”
The resettlement program’s founder, the Rev. John Zayas, said he began welcoming migrants to his church, Grace and Peace Community, in 2022 soon after the first buses arrived.
Zayas initially volunteered the North Austin church as a space for migrants to stay for up to two days before moving onto state-sponsored hotel rooms. But he soon began hosting them long-term, inspired by his father’s story of staying with family in Chicago when he first arrived from Puerto Rico.
That was exactly what his father needed to properly establish himself here and eventually establish their family here.
“They need hope, they have to see the vision of what they can be when they arrive here,” Zayas said of migrants arriving in Chicago, adding that “vision” is what gives them “the motivation to build a future.”
Last summer, the church transitioned away from sheltering migrants there but still oversees wrap-around services and other forms of support for participating churches.
Five churches are currently hosting migrants, Zayas said, with several more offering financial support.
The program is small — Zayas said at least 400 migrants have gotten housing through it — but he imagines that if only “a hundred of the thousands of churches in Chicago” participated, no one would be sleeping at a police station.
It’s also an alternative to the city’s overloaded program. Asylum-seekers in city shelters can get help covering up to 6 months rent, but that program’s reach has been limited.
Catholic Charities is the leading provider of the program. In July — when 1,000 people arrived — it signed leases for 125 households; 311 in August, when 1,500 arrived; and 491 in September, when 3,500 arrived. Its goal for October was to get 500 households to sign leases, when 3,000 migrants arrived, according data shared by the city in a briefing with reporters last month.
“What’s happening now is so many migrants have come, there’s a bottleneck in the system,” Zayas said, “and that’s why you have the outcry of community and other folks who really don’t understand the bigger picture.”
In recent months, the city has talked about pioneering similar programs with churches but so far has only done so with one, a North Side church that has hosted groups of 50 since last December, according to church Rev. Chad Bacon.
A city spokesperson called that shelter — the New Life Community Church in Lake View — “an emergency overflow site that was activated as a stop gap measure.”
The space doesn’t have showers, as required of city shelters, but there’s a large kitchen and a willingness to welcome people.
“When you get to know these people and have heard about the journey they’ve been on, you just want to help,” Bacon said.
New York City, which has received about ten times as many migrants as Chicago, has a church-based shelter program, though it’s floundered since its start in September.
By late October only two churches were participating, out of 50 originally expected to participate, according to reporting by the New York Daily News. A city spokesperson told the Daily News that the program had stalled on account of building code issues.
Building issues have also been a problem in Chicago, where a volunteer-run shelter in Pilsen ultimately closed due to challenges insuring it.
The Rev. Jonathan de la O, the pastor of another church in Zayas’ church resettlement program, first brought a group of migrants to the Belmont Cragin church in May.
That church, Starting Point Community Church, is one of five in the program, Zayas said.
De la O has opened his shelter to single men — 17 are there now and 18 have found housing through it.
Leoscar Colmenarez was among the first to move in.
“When the pastor brought us here from the police station there were no separate rooms but, at least we had a roof over our heads, thank God,” said Colemenarez, 36, who was at the Grand Central station for about a month.
The Venezuelan native said he understands the plan is to find a job to save a few thousand dollars for an apartment of his own but appreciates de la O’s understanding of just how difficult that can be.
“The problem he said is we haven’t found someone who can consistently give us work,” he said.
Colmenarez has been there about five months, but de la O said most are there for two.
In the meantime, when not working, the men have chores to maintain the shelter, plus voluntarily they have started helping migrants still in stations.
Juan Herrera, a Colombian migrant, said they cook meals to deliver to stations and drop off care packages that include baggies of clothes, jackets and assorted hygiene products.
Still, he worries it’s not enough.
“We go out there to the stations and we see what it’s like,” said Herrera, 33. “They’re freezing out there.”
Michael Loria is a staff reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.
