A not-so-warm welcome for thousands of migrants now sleeping outside in Chicago

CHICAGO — Frangeny Mendoza, 27, huddled on a thin fleece Salvation Army blanket next to her husband, Pedro Matos, 30, and 8-year-old son, Ediomar, Tuesday night in Edna White Century Garden, which over the past month has become a tent encampment for hundreds of migrants waiting for shelter placement at the nearby Morgan Park police station.

The family from Venezuela, who were put on a bus by city officials in El Paso, Texas, and sent to Chicago without knowing where they were going, spent their first three nights in the sanctuary city sleeping outside on the ground.

“It’s so cold here, but we have nowhere to go. We don’t have anyone here,” she said in Spanish.

Wind and rain have descended on Chicago at the same time as unprecedented numbers of migrants from the southern border. For months, the city has been scrambling to house thousands of migrants who have been sent on buses by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott since August 2022, placing them in the lobbies of police stations.

But now there is less space than ever and city officials have no concrete plan moving forward on the prospect of winterized base camps, raising alarm from experts about a looming humanitarian disaster.

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, said Thursday that the city has received 63 buses from the southern border over the past week alone, some with no warning. There are over 11,000 migrants in city-run shelters and over 3,000 waiting for placement.

With Abbott threatening to send more than 1,000 migrants every day, the city is averaging a new shelter every six days, said the deputy chief of staff. And the city receives even more on planes from Catholic Charities in San Antonio.

Pacione-Zayas said Thursday that Chicago is a sanctuary city with welcoming values, but she said there is only so much the city can do. The mayor’s 2024 budget unveiled Wednesday included only $150 million in migrant funding — less than half the projected costs this year.

“It wouldn’t be right if we did not let folks know the limitations that we have,” she said. “We’ve inherited no infrastructure for this.”

Mendoza is a hairdresser and beauty technician. She came to the United States with her husband and two sons, Ediomar and 11-year-old Maykel, because she was having trouble making enough money to survive, she said.

The majority of migrants who have arrived over the past year come from Venezuela and are fleeing a collapsed economy, where they say they struggle to make more than $25 a week.

On her way to the United States, she said she fell down the stairs of a two-story building in Guatemala and broke her collarbone, extending a journey that would have already taken months. She and her family waited days to save more than $1,000 for the platinum she needed to stabilize her neck. The operation was free, Mendoza said, but the metal bar cost them their family’s savings.

After her surgery, things didn’t get easier.

She and her family rode on a freight train through Mexico, watching a man try to jump on it, miss and die. They entered the United States as parolees but were immediately put in a detention center in El Paso, where they were given frozen burritos to eat and not much more. They said all of their belongings except their cellphones were taken from them and thrown away.

After a week in detention — seven days without bathing, and barely resting — they were released in El Paso, where they slept in the street because there was no room for them in city shelters.

Jesús de la Torre, a research fellow at Hope Border Institute, which works with migrants in El Paso as well as Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, said numbers at the border are soaring due to a combination of violence, economic instability and a change of immigration policy following the pandemic.

“There are spikes in releases (from detention centers), with 1,600 in just one day,” he said about the situation in El Paso. “Shelters are at capacity. … The community is stressed. The city is doing a lot. The county is responding.”

The family entered a city strained for resources and were put on a bus to a different, equally strained city. Upon arrival, they were dropped off by the Chicago Office of Emergency Management at the police station in Morgan Park.

“They don’t even know they’re coming to Chicago. That has some concerns for us around trafficking. Human trafficking, that is,” said Pacione-Zayas.

Peter Andreas, a professor of international studies and political science at Brown University, called the busing by Abbott an “interesting extension of the idea of trafficking.” The federal government can legally put migrants on buses and move them around the border, he said, but southern governors likely don’t have the legal authority to act in the same way — especially to send migrants across state lines.

Amid political warfare where people are shipped around the United States like pawns, volunteers helping provide services to migrants at police stations are struggling to keep up.

Volunteers drop off tents at the Morgan Park police station, but Mendoza said people who have been staying at the station for days get tent priority. She and her family just got to the station, so they’ll have to wait.

On Monday evening, Jennifer Meade, who volunteers at the Morgan Park police station, delivered a $90 tent, which she said she mostly paid for with her own money.

Meade said as temperatures drop, volunteers helping migrants at the station are doing what they can to scrounge up blankets and sleeping bags. Many Venezuelans have never experienced cold like this.

“The crisis is just overwhelming. Every night,” she said.

Around the city, volunteers have voiced similar concerns.

On the first night that temperatures dropped below 50 degrees last week, Erika Villegas, the lead volunteer at the police station in Chicago Lawn, called on her network of volunteers to bring in more help. There are nearly 200 migrants there, including at least 20 children, she said, and there is no longer enough space for all of them to spend the night inside the station.

Children shivered as their parents tried to wrap them around their arms while laying on the grass and sidewalks.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Villegas said. “But we’re running out of funds, out of energy. Now we can only provide them with words of encouragement, but frankly, I’m losing hope myself.”

Heather Nichols, one of the volunteers leading efforts at the police station in Garfield Park, said the situation looked different in the summer. Conversations among mutual aid networks then centered around hygiene, human contact and care.

Now, she said, everything is more desperate. People are getting sick from the cold.

“When people are being treated inhumanely for large stretches of time with no respite, it’s hard to imagine that this is any sort of way to set people up for success in assimilating and becoming productive members of this country,” she said.

Migrants at a station on the Near South Side have moved into the cement area that separates the incoming and outgoing traffic at State and 18th streets. Some police stations around the city close their indoor bathrooms to migrants, so people are washing themselves in port-a-potties. The stations are beginning to smell, and many migrants are growing anxious.

Some have expressed the possibility of returning to Venezuela or a different country where they can endure the winter. But most are hopeful that, sooner than later, they’ll have a warm place to sleep.

Karina Ayala-Bermejo, the president and CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, said the nonprofit is asking Chicagoans for drop-off donations in front of their building, 2555 S. Blue Island Ave., on the Lower West Side.

“We are really hoping for new or very gently used,” she said. “We want to give our families clothes that are clean. Something they can be proud to wear. Outer gear. Gloves. Socks. Shoes. Winter shoes.”

Those interested can also purchase items through their Amazon gift registry, she said.

On the Tuesday cold night in Morgan Park, Mendoza said the metal bar replacing her shattered collarbone stings when it’s cold. She said she’s still in a lot of pain, and hoped a volunteer would bring her Tylenol.

“Maybe right now we are going through a hard time, but I have hope that we will come out stronger,” she said. “Maybe not tomorrow, but we will have a bed. A house.”

At around 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Mendoza’s son Ediomar buried himself under a thin blanket. He had traversed a jungle, watched his mother wait days in excruciating pain for medical treatment and boarded a charter bus to a place he had never heard of before.

Mendoza looked over at the group of migrants sitting in folding chairs, the streetlight illuminating their circle of tents. Laughter cut through the chilling air. Someone had hung a hammock between two trees.

“They say it takes two or three weeks to get into a shelter,” she said. “And they also say it will snow. I don’t know, but that’s what they say.”