A bloc of aldermen want to force a special City Council meeting on Chicago’s response to the migrant crisis, with criticism rising about the city’s growing system of makeshift shelters and with hundreds of asylum-seekers still huddled on police station floors.
Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, called for the special session during a heated immigration committee hearing Wednesday featuring a city presentation that she said downplayed the urgency — and her ire only grew after she began questioning officials.
“So y’all didn’t think with the (Democratic National Convention) here, nobody bothered about discussing with Biden (and his) administration about the conditions that we’re having with the shelters and the asylum-seekers?” Taylor said, confronting the department heads about Tuesday’s gathering with top Democratic Party officials to celebrate the political convention coming to Chicago in 2024.
Matt Doughtie, the city’s manager of emergency management services, answered: “I don’t believe that it was a topic of discussion.”
“How? How?” Taylor exclaimed before demanding a special council meeting and accusing the city of lacking a comprehendible plan to address the crisis. “I’m sorry, I cannot continue to be supportive of something that is not all-hands-on-deck.”
Several progressive colleagues on the committee joined Taylor in committing to a special City Council meeting, more than fulfilling the three-aldermen minimum required to force the session.It signaled the sharpest pressure yet for Chicago officials tasked with one of the new mayoral administration’s most intractable dilemmas.
Amid conflicts between migrants and neighborhood residents, and complaints over Park District programs being disrupted by migrant lodging, multiple aldermen shared Taylor’s gripes over how the shelter rollout has fared in their wards.
Others raised transparency concerns over spending, with committee chair Ald. Andre Vasquez noting that City Council members have not received one line-item budget of all the migrant costs so far.
“We inherited a flawed approach to this mission,” Beatriz Ponce De León, deputy immigration mayor, said before the committee meeting, pointing out how Mayor Brandon Johnson only began his term in May, when the number of new asylum-seeking arrivals jumped and has continued to grow.
In total, more than 11,500 asylum-seekers have arrived since August 2022, when Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott sent the first busload of migrants north to Chicago. More than 5,400 are currently staying at city-run shelters, up 43.5% from January.
More concerning still is that 941 are waiting inside Chicago police stations or at O’Hare and Midway airports for a place to stay, with the vast majority sleeping on the floors of police district lobbies. A probe into whether some officers engaged in sexual misconduct with some of the migrants is ongoing, though as of last week investigators said they haven’t found any victims yet. Johnson has vowed to get all new arrivals out of police stations “as soon as possible. That is our top priority.”
But freshman Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth, 48th, said the haste to remove the migrants from stations is going to lead to similarly inadequate housing.
“Sometimes going fast is not the best,” said Manaa-Hoppenworth, who also expressed displeasure with plans to open a migrant shelter at the Broadway Armory Park facility in her ward in Edgewater. “Sometimes you have to hit pause and really listen to each other and really listen to the community, because oftentimes they have the answer.”
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Brandie Knazze, commissioner of the Department of Family and Support Services, responded: “Having almost 1,000 people in police stations is not the best solution, so we are working very diligently to find alternatives.”
The Broadway Armory, a former National Guard facility with five gyms and 13 meeting rooms, runs senior and teen centers as well as a flying trapeze school, a computer lab and a pingpong room. The latter two amenities will be shut down while the migrant shelter is in operation, and summer programming will cease or move elsewhere. The senior center that provides free meals will remain open, however.
In a letter to her constituents, Manaa-Hoppenworth said that “despite our ongoing efforts to facilitate a community-driven process, the city has decided to move forward with using the Armory as a shelter beginning August 1.”
“I am disappointed with the way that this process has unfolded,” Manaa-Hoppenworth continued. “While I disagree with the decision-making process, I agree with the mission of supporting new arrivals wholeheartedly. We have a moral responsibility to help those who arrive in our ward.”
Pedestrians passing by the Armory on Wednesday expressed conflicting feelings toward what they described as a moral responsibility to help people staying in their neighborhoods but also resentment that the city wants to repurpose the space without community input.
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Quynh Hoang, a mother of two picking up her son from summer camp at the Armory, said there are no other options available at affordable prices in nearby parks.
”This park means a lot to different people. They could use a different building,” Hoang said.
A group of senior women gathered to join in on sharing discontent.
”It is unrealistic to share this space with asylum-seekers,” said Ginger Williams, a senior woman who runs Edgewater Village Chicago inside the Armory.
Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly, in the moderate faction of the City Council, shared Taylor’s fury that aldermen have been left to fend for themselves.
“God knows how many migrant families are fearing for their health and safety in the Inn (of Chicago) and on a daily basis,” Reilly, 42nd, said about the Streeterville hotel that is hosting more than a thousand migrants right now. “There’s no rule of law.”
Reilly argued that while the majority of asylum-seekers are “doing the right thing,” there are some making the neighborhood less safe. He said his own observations and those of constituents include littered alcohol bottles and marijuana butts, drug dealing and teens with apparent guns in their waist bands.
Knazze and other city officials acknowledged that migrant shelters have grappled with misbehaving residents, a few of whom had to be removed. She said her department has secured Chicago police special attention posts to troublesome locations for traffic enforcement and crackdowns on narcotics, which have been sold around the shelters.
“A shelter is a microcosm of what we experience in our city,” Knazze said. “We got good actors, and we have bad apples.”
Officials added that the city is moving nimbly to expand shelter capacity and resettle asylum-seekers into permanent housing. About 1,340 migrants have secured their first apartments, though only a fraction have moved out by now to start their leases, Knazze said.
And Doughtie, the city emergency manager, said city staffers have visited sites in other municipalities, including Berwyn and Aurora. But either location would have a long way to go given that the city must still engage with a suburb’s leaders, as well as the state.
But for Taylor, whose ward contains a migrant shelter inside the former Wadsworth Elementary School, the clock is ticking.
At a community meeting between city officials and Woodlawn residents Monday, grievances included claims of migrants loitering, littering and participating in illicit activities such as drug use and prostitution.
City officials also confirmed an incident July 14 in which a shelter resident blocked the driveway of a neighboring homeowner with a parked car, leading to a physical altercation and another car being subsequently vandalized. Afterward, the city expelled 17 residents from the shelter, four of whom were permanently banned from the system.
And after complaints from its residents, a nearby senior living facility managed by the Chicago Housing Authority, Kenneth Campbell Apartments, has filed a criminal trespass affidavit that will be enforced by Chicago police.
“The community has been disrespected,” Taylor said during the Monday meeting. “But it is time for us to try to fix what has happened and know that we all have to work together. It’s never too late.”
larodriguez@chicagotribune.com
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