Chicago City Wire

During the Aug. 13 edition of "The Real Story," host Jeanne Ives spoke with Congressman Mark Green, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security. Green announced a five-phase investigation into the open borders and an upcoming hearing on the human cost.

“We hear from Chicago that they’re spending $7,000 per month, per illegal immigrant coming in," Green said. "They’re going to look to the federal government to bail them out of a problem that literally is the federal government’s problem. It's a trade-off. We can’t protect all the other infrastructure that we need to protect when we have massive amounts of illegal immigration."

In response to a statement by Ives about the cost of immigration and what Congress knows about the human cost, Green said, “That’s going to happen. We are in phase three, which is the human cost. There will be a hearing on Sept. 13 on that. The financial cost will begin after that, that’s phase four, and then we’ll look into waste, fraud and abuse in phase five.”

In April of this year, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending asylum seekers to declared sanctuary cities as a protest of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, Chicago officials were warning of a coming crisis, according to a report from PBS. 

Heather Cherone, from WTTW Chicago, spoke with host John Yang, and said that previously, about 10 migrants a day were coming to Chicago, and then the numbers grew to “75 to 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,” she said.

On July 27, Block Club Chicago announced that the city would partner with area nonprofits to run migrant shelters. The publication wrote, “Nonprofits will be able to apply to take over operations at a city-funded shelter starting in the winter or request funding to continue running shelters they established on their own,” said Brandi Knazze, commissioner of the Department of Family and Support Services.

“Volunteers and community groups who have been working on the front lines with migrants have pushed for the city to work with them to mimic neighborhood-based shelter efforts so they can get more asylum-seekers housed and on the path to self-sufficiency. The city’s scramble to expand migrant shelters follows an effort by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and other Republican governors to send buses carrying migrants to sanctuary cities like Chicago as a key federal border policy expires. Nearly 12,000 asylum-seekers have arrived to Chicago since last summer, and the city has struggled to maintain sufficient shelter spaces for people,” the report stated.