Chicago City Wire

Chicago residents are struggling to deal with the unexpected changes and disasters caused by Chicago’s stance as a Sanctuary City.

"Chicago has budgeted 125 MILLION dollars from Jan-Jun to take care of migrants dropped off in Chicago," Ja'Mal Green, a Chicago business owner, tweeted recently. "This is a humanitarian crisis for sure but the real crisis is the fact that I’ve never seen Chicago move forward money for any other crisis this fast. Take notes. We can solve our homelessness problem aka our housing problems, our environmental problems, our jobs problems, etc. We found 125 million for 6 months, don’t tell me we can’t do it for anything else."

It is well known that Chicago has been receiving a huge influx of noncitizen immigrants in the past few months, with more than 8,100 arriving since August 2022, a recent WLS report said. Mayor Lori Lightfoot released an official statement regarding the subject in the form of a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. In the letter she urged him to stop sending busloads of people to her city because “we simply have no more shelters, spaces, or resources to accommodate an increase of individuals at this level, with little coordination or care, that does not pose a risk to them or others.”

The crisis has grown, with noncitizen immigrants sleeping on the floors of police stations while receiving rations of expired food sent out by the City officials, a recent ABC 7 report said. Police officials are frustrated, commenting that they are unequipped to provide services and take care of the people, with many being pregnant women or young children. Any stances on immigration aside, the police departments have seen health concerns like lice, bed bugs and chicken pox. This runs alongside several cases of illegal immigrants being house in the Inn of Chicago.

The crisis is not only a health concern for the city, but also a safety concern, an ICE news release said. A detainer from Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) was put on a man living in Chicago after he was arrested for sexually assaulting a three-year-old girl in a restaurant and then assaulting another woman shortly before his arrest. ICE called him “a previously deported aggravated felon illegally present in the United States,” but Chicago PD blocked their detainer as they always do with ICE and kept the noncitizen immigrant in their city community.

Average Chicago families are being affected by the growing issue, with a local park being shut down to the locals in order to use it as a “temporary migrant center,” CBS Chicago reported recently. Brands Park, on Chicago’s northwest side, is being shut down and turned into a camp for the immigrants. Students will no longer be able to attend the after-school programs that were being held there; the programs will be moved to two different parks in the area. Brands Park will also not be able to host their normal summer programs, which many of the local students look forward too and working parents depend on. Most of all, they are frustrated by the lack of warning and communication from City officials.

City finance officials have reported that it costs the City at least $20 million per month to handle all of the illegal immigrants in the city, WTTW reported recently. In City Council discussions, the Finance Department announced that it will cost the City a total of $124.8 million to address the issue from January of 2023 through June of the same year. While they received some state and federal funding for the issue, no source gave the City their full request amount, so City officials asked for $53 million from their own surplus funds to cover the costs.