CHICAGO -- Across the street from the 1st District police station, Hildemaro Rafael Peña Gonzalez, 23, from Venezuela, fed cereal out of a plastic takeout container to his pregnant wife Racnia del Carmen León Mendoza, 19, and rubbed her swollen belly. The couple was moved from the station to a shelter in a hotel downtown about 10 days ago, but came back to the small basketball cancha, or court, to sit on a bench in the shade.
“People have been nice (downtown),” said Gonzalez in Spanish, “But it’s nicer here.”
It’s a sentiment shared by many. Though migrants from shelters across the city told the Tribune that sleeping in a shelter bed or on an air mattress is better than on the ground in police stations, the support and care they’re receiving appears, in most cases, to be worse.
