There is a humanitarian crisis developing in Chicago. As temperatures drop into the 40s, thousands of migrants have been unable to find room indoors to sleep and are forced to camp outside — sometimes with no tents and no blankets.
“It’s so cold here, but we have nowhere to go. We don’t have anyone here,” said 27-year-old Frangeny Mendoza, who was sitting on a Salvation Army blanket. She was sitting next to her husband, Pedro Matos, 30, and 8-year-old son, Ediomar, in Edna White Century Garden.
Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson had been promising “winterized” tents to shelter the thousands of migrants who are sleeping in police stations and makeshift shelters around the city. So far, nothing. And time is running out.
Medoza is from Venezuela, as are most of the new arrivals in Chicago. The cold weather is something they’ve never experienced.
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.
Snow by Halloween is not unusual in Chicago, so time is running very short. Johnson appears paralyzed by the crisis. Shouldn’t he be screaming bloody murder at the White House to get it off its rear end?
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.”
Some of these migrants are going to die unless Johnson, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and the Democrats in Washington stop trying to pass the buck on whose fault the crisis is and take action. Congress is hopeless right now, so it falls to the president to accept responsibility for the crisis and use his emergency powers to start addressing the needs of people he all but invited here three years ago.
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