CHICAGO (CN) — The self-proclaimed "Welcoming City" is moving forward with planned migrant evictions this Sunday, as part of a 60-day migrant shelter stay limit that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson's administration established months ago.
Johnson's office is refusing to back down on the eviction plans despite fierce pushback from Chicago's immigrant advocates and prominent left-wing factions, and amid an outbreak of measles in one migrant shelter on the South Side.
The Chicago Public Health Department has confirmed 12 measles cases in the city since last week, 10 of which are in the South Side migrant shelter. Six of the cases are adults and six are children. It is the first measles outbreak the city has seen since 2019, and part of a nationwide resurgence of the highly-infectious viral disease. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 states have reported measles cases since the start of 2024.
As part of its attempt to control the outbreak, the city said Friday that all new arrivals in city migrant shelters will be required to receive vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella.
"As of March 10th, 2024, new arrivals ... who fail to report their vaccination status or refuse voluntary vaccination will not be placed in a shelter," Johnson's office said.
Johnson's office also announced Friday that those living in the shelter afflicted by the measles outbreak will be exempt from eviction for at least 28 days. Families with minor children will also get a 30-day eviction reprieve that can be renewed through June. The city added that it will evaluate case-by-case exceptions for pregnant people, people with disabilities and mental health concerns, those grieving the death of a loved one and those fleeing gendered violence.
"It's a step in the right direction," City Councilor Byron Sigcho-Lopez, in whose ward the measles-afflicted shelter is located, said said of the last-minute changes in a phone interview. "But it also needs to be an opportunity to look at our housing justice project."
Facing increasing numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers arriving in the city, Johnson's office first established the 60-day shelter stay limit last November. The move generated immediate scorn from from city hall progressives and immigration advocates, especially as Johnson ran for office as the furthest-left candidate in the 2022 mayoral race. Days before the first round of evictions was set to take place in January — and in the midst of a cold snap that saw temperatures drop well below zero — the mayor agreed to a temporary pause that his office later extended until this weekend.
With temperatures on the rise, the mayor is now less willing to budge on the planned evictions.
The city expects to evict 34 shelter residents in total on Sunday, though it could push several thousand more out by the end of April. Those evicted can seek placement in another shelter — though Johnson, who maintained Friday that the city is committed to "compassion" for migrants, said he hopes the move will encourage "resettlement."
“By encouraging resettlement while also providing case-specific extensions with a focus on health and safety, we are advancing a pathway to stability and self-sufficiency,” the mayor said in a prepared statement.
Others are skeptical, still criticizing the 60-day eviction policy as dehumanizing and disruptive.
"A shelter eviction needlessly disrupts and slows new arrivals' paths to self sufficiency and integration," over three dozen community organizations and 22 city councilors — including some of Johnson's closest allies — said in an open letter to the mayor on Monday. "New arrivals will be separated from their case managers, their support systems, their neighborhoods and their children's schools, only to have to rebuild these relationships anew."
Over 37,000 new arrivals, many from Venezuela, have arrived in Chicago since the summer 2022. Most were sent here from the southern border by Republican Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott as part of an explicit political attack on Democrat-controlled cities. Per city data, over 11,000 of them are currently housed in city shelters.
The city councilors' open letter on Monday was not the only criticism levied at the Johnson administration's handling of the migrant crisis. A September 2023 plan to house new arrivals in a "base camp" tent city on the South Side — operated by controversial security company GardaWorld for $29.3 million — was scrapped at the last minute in December after opponents raised concerns that the land slotted for the camp was contaminated with toxic metals.
Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker even publicly rebuked Johnson over the plan, eliding that, per a 2023 Chicago Tribune investigation, the GardaWorld contract for the site was made possible under a pre-existing $125 million master contract that state officials inked with the company in 2022.
The city-run shelters themselves have also faced criticism of being unhygienic and poorly managed, particularly after a five-year-old migrant boy named Jean Carlos Martinez Rivero died of sepsis in one shelter in December.
Still others have pointed to the apparent hypocrisy of Johnson's administration pushing migrants out of shelters while at the same time championing the "Bring Chicago Home" voter referendum on the March 19 primary ballot. The referendum, if passed, will restructure the city's real estate sales tax with the explicit purpose of funding homelessness alleviation efforts. It has survived a tumultuous run through the state court system after a wealthy coalition of landlords, real estate firms and property development companies sued in January to strike it down.
Homelessness is a long-running issue in Chicago, with the advocacy group Chicago Coalition for The Homeless estimating that 68,440 people were homeless in the city as of 2021. The influx of new arrivals has likely inflated that figure.
Sigcho-Lopez, one of the signatories to Monday's letter opposing the shelter evictions, agreed that the city needed to do more to address housing justice in the city, for new migrants and long-time residents alike. He advocated not just for Bring Chicago Home but for a vacancy tax on landlords who keep their rental properties empty, and to partner with the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago to house migrants in unused churches.
"We can't leave houses empty while people are facing eviction," the city councilor said.
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