Chicago warns of humanitarian crisis as city struggles to house migrants

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• John Yang:

  The migrant crisis has made its way north to Chicago. More than 8,000 migrants have arrived there since last August. That's when Texas Governor Greg Abbott began bussing asylum seekers to so called sanctuary cities as a protest against immigration policies.

  Chicago officials say the daily arrivals there have increased tenfold over the last two weeks, and there's no place for all of them to go. While they wait for beds in city shelters to become available, some are sleeping on floors in police station lobbies and for a time at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

  City officials are saying this is a humanitarian crisis. Heather Cherone has been covering it for Chicago's public television station WTTW. Heather, is this reached crisis levels now or has this been a slow burning problem?

• Heather Cherone, WTTW Chicago News:

  So it's a little bit of both, John, the problem has really sort of ratcheted up significantly in the last 10 days. And that is when as you said the number of immigrants arriving in Chicago increased significantly before the last 10 days about, you know, 10 of migrants a day were arriving in Chicago.

  Now that number is anywhere between 75 and 100 per day. And that has really stretched the city shelter system beyond the breaking point. So it had been sort of a slow burning problem since the fall when really this reached the first peak.

  And now there's a second peak of this humanitarian crisis according to city officials, and there's not enough money or capacity to house these people who are arriving in Chicago, really, with not much more than the clothes on their back.

• John Yang:

  Does anyone have an idea why this is this surge is taking place now?

• Heather Cherone:

  Well, I think it is a little bit to do with the fact that the weather has warmed up, and that there has been some change in sort of how officials at the border or pros — are processing asylum seekers. And of course, instead of caring for these people in Texas and another border states, they're being sent to Chicago, for the first time really on planes before they were really arriving on buses and the city had sort of set up a system to deal with those arrivals.

  But this is presented new challenges for a city officials that were already sort of stretched to the breaking point. And they say they can't really do much more because they've yet to get any financial aid from the federal government and have only received $20 million from the state government, which they said they've already spent leaving them really with empty pockets to deal with this surge that they really did not anticipate happening until after the public health rule Title 42 is lifted in a couple of weeks. So that has also added to the problem.

• John Yang:

  The city agencies are really bearing the brunt of this if they asked for help, or are they going to get help from either the state or the federal government?

• Heather Cherone:

  Well, to city council committee has held a hearing on this on Friday, where city officials said that they were pleading with state and federal officials to do more. But there's really no timeframe for those requests for help to be answered, which means that the city is going to ask the city council to dip into the city surplus and set aside $53 million in the coming weeks to help care for these immigrants.

  But that assumes that the surge will continue at this current level and not get significantly greater, which is a bet I don't think anybody is willing to take. So this problem is much more likely to get worse than better anytime soon.

• John Yang:

  And the city is about to have a change of governments, change of mayors, the new mayor is inaugurated May 15th. Is that going to complicate things?

• Heather Cherone:

  So they say that it's not going to complicate things because the outgoing administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot says they're coordinating closely with mayor elect Brandon Johnson. But this is a difficult time to sort of make sure that programs are continuing and nobody's missing a beat. So that is certainly an added complication.

  When you have sort of a crisis to the point where people are sleeping in police stations and at the at the airport, prompting a lot of hard questions from older people who want to know what's being done to address this now once, again, very visible problem in Chicago.

• John Yang:

  You know, Chicago has been an essentially asylum city since Harold Washington was Mary issued an executive order saying the police wouldn't enforce immigration laws. Are people beginning to rethink that because of this?

• Heather Cherone:

  No, I don't think so. I think that the Chicago believes that this is a crisis, as mayor Lightfoot has said, very time, really created by Republican governors, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who are trying to sort of make this a political problem that where it doesn't otherwise need to be.

  But there's no sense that Chicagoans don't want to care for these people, but are in fact frustrated that the city has fallen behind essentially the eight ball and having the ability to care for these people.

  Now, if you talk to city officials, including Mayor Lightfoot, she says city's doing absolutely everything its can and this is — this problem is due to the lack of response, both by the federal government and the state government. A politically complicated stance to take, of course because President Joe Biden and Governor JB Pritzker are both Democrats, as is Mayor Lightfoot, Lori Lightfoot and mayor elect Brandon Johnson,

• John Yang:

  Heather Cherone from Chicago public television station WTTW. Thank you very much.

• Heather Cherone:

  Pleasure to be with you, John.