Chicagoans say mayor isn’t doing enough to help migrants

CHICAGO (CN) — Chicagoan Anthony Moser says the city isn't facing a crisis of migration, as officials claim — the crisis is one of capacity.

Activists like Moser and citizens say Mayor Brandon Johnson has only added fuel to the fire in the ongoing migrant housing crisis.

This criticism comes on the heels of the death of 5-year-old Carlos Martinez. The boy was staying at a migrant shelter in Pilsen when he suffered a medical emergency and was taken to Comer Children’s Hospital on Dec. 17, where he died.

At a press conference on Dec. 18, Johnson expressed his sympathy for the boy and his family but maintained Martinez's death was because of mismanagement at the border — not within the city of Chicago.

Johnson said Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s plan of bussing asylum-seekers to Chicago is inhumane.  He added that many of these people are in poor conditions at the border before they even get on a bus. 

“Do y’all understand how raggedy and how evil that is? You’re just gonna put people on a bus and take them somewhere and drop them off in the middle of the night, and then you wanna hold us accountable for something that’s happening down at the border? It’s sickening,” Johnson told reporters on Dec. 18.

Moser, with environmental nonprofit Neighbors for Environmental Justice, said Johnson and the city have taken no real responsibility for the boy’s death, or the conditions that could’ve created it.

“I think what most people would recognize here is that this didn’t happen at the border,” Moser said. “This happened at 22nd and Halsted.”

The mayor's office did not respond to a request for further comment.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the day after Martinez died, four girls and one woman who were also staying at the Pilsen shelter were taken to the hospital with fever and vomiting.

Incident reports from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications indicate shelters had been in dire conditions months before Martinez’s death. Between August and October, rats and bugs were reported multiple times at shelters around the city, as were several instances of domestic violence and gun violence.

Borderless magazine reported just days before Martinez’s death that dozens of migrants at the Pilsen shelter said the living conditions were harsh, “including cramped living quarters, mistreatment from workers, freezing temperatures and unsanitary bathrooms.”

Moser said the continued poor conditions at the shelters were due in part to how Johnson’s administration has contracted the management of the shelters out to private vendors. He noted many city shelters are managed and staffed by Favorite Staffing, a health care staffing agency, not city employees.

An incident action plan from September and October showed that many of the medical, planning and operations positions were either vacant or filled by Favorite Staffing employees.

"They call it a city shelter, but it's like a stack of vendors and a trench coat," Moser said.

He added it's hard for city officials and the mayor to have any real accountability when they're outsourcing the management of migrant shelters to private vendors.

"I think that really shows the city's own lack of capacity and also disinterest in creating that capacity," Moser said.

Several groups have echoed Moser’s concerns, especially in relation to the city’s agreement with GardaWorld.

"Through his dictate to use GardaWorld, Mayor Johnson continues to display a desire to contain, sort, concentrate, surveil and criminalize already precarious people," the Chicago Anti Detention Network said in a statement. "We renew our demand to cancel the GardaWorld contract and reject equivalent arrangements such as Heartland Alliance. As a first step toward stable and safe housing, we demand solutions that include all unhoused people in one, unified shelter system."

Meanwhile, some Chicago citizens and politicians say new arrivals are getting preferential treatment. At a City Council meeting on Nov. 8, Chicago activist Zakiyyah Muhammad told the mayor she campaigned and voted for him because she thought he'd be on the "right side of history" She pleaded him to stop the buses from coming in because "it's hurting your people."

Alderman Anthony Beale made a similar plea to the mayor at the meeting.

“Chicago has yet to say we can't take anymore. I think we have to draw the line somewhere," Beale said. "It's a diversion to continue to say this is a federal problem. We need help from the federal government. Yeah, we know that. But why are we waiting for the federal government to act? We need to be doing something here at home to protect us."

Johnson joined the New York City and Denver mayors at a press conference this week to pressure the Biden administration for more aid to cities that are receiving large influxes of asylum-seekers.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said his city has the largest number of migrants per capita, and that there are clear steps the federal government can take to alleviate the pressure on cities. These steps include dramatically increasing work authorizations for migrants, more federal funding and a coordinated plan of entry.

Moser said the proper solution isn't as simple as just federal funding or a new vendor. He said the city needs to develop a system that actually serves everyone.

"They could just be acknowledging that the new residents are not being failed because they're new, they're being failed because they're residents," he said. "And if they would just have admitted that these people actually have the same needs as people who live here, then they could have used this as an opportunity to say we have to rebuild this in a way that serves everyone."

Follow @RosenCaitlyn

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