CHICAGO — A coalition of alderpeople are again asking Mayor Brandon Johnson to abandon a 60-day migrant shelter stay limit days before the policy is set to be enforced.
Led by Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), 18 alderpeople signed a letter to Johnson saying the plan to evict migrants from city-run shelters after a 60-day stay could hinder the city’s efforts to address the humanitarian crisis. The first evictions are set for Saturday.
Johnson announced the maximum shelter stay policy in November as the city struggled to find housing for tens of thousands of migrants bused here from Texas. The policy was an effort to open beds for new arrivals, but it drew backlash from elected officials and mutual aid groups.
The first wave of evictions has been postponed three times due to extreme winter weather. With a measles outbreak in the city’s biggest migrant shelter, officials are asking the mayor to again rethink the policy. At least seven measles cases hace been identified at a city-run shelter for migrants in Pilsen since last week.
“Your office risks cutting against Chicago’s values and severely harming the same new arrivals Chicago has worked diligently to care for,” Vasquez wrote in the letter. “We need an end to this policy, as it doesn’t solve our challenges, it merely exacerbates and displaces them.”
The letter was signed by 18 alderpeople, city Clerk Anna Valencia and 19 community organizations working with migrants.
Vasquez said the eviction policy’s delay due to weather, and the outbreak of measles, shows the ineffectiveness of the plan.
“This illustrates why there shouldn’t be a 60-day policy at all. We should be doing this on a case-by-case basis for new arrivals so we can be more malleable for situations that arise,” Vasquez said. “With the blanket 60-day policy, you’re pushing evictions off to just revisit this conversation every couple of months. That’s not the responsible way forward.”
Rather than evict migrants from shelters en mass, a case-by-case model would identify who can live independently while making room for new arrivals, said Vasquez, who chairs the City Council’s immigration committee.
“You’re looking at thousands of people who will be put out in the street because they either can’t get rental assistance or work authorization. These folks are going to end up homeless and not at the landing zone but probably close to the shelter they were at,” Vasquez said.
Vasquez submitted his letter to Johnson’s office Tuesday. It also calls on the mayor to work with state and federal officials to expedite work permits for migrants and boost housing assistance programs. The alderman and his colleagues penned a similar letter in January, before Johnson again delayed the shelter eviction policy.
Mutual aid groups and activists joined the call for an end to the eviction policy at a rally Saturday in the Loop.
Work permits are the biggest road blocks to migrants becoming independent in their new home, volunteers said at the rally. Asylum seekers from South and Central America have not been issued work permits, which hinders their ability to participate more fully in society.
Even when families are able to move out of shelters and find housing, the lack of available jobs can be a hindrance for migrants, said Mimi Guiracocha, a public health nurse and mutual aid volunteer who attended the rally.
“What ends up happening is that they get into those houses, and they know that they won’t be able to afford it when those [aid] funds run out,” Guiracocha said. “Why? Because they don’t have work permits.”
The eviction policy is to move forward in waves, with about 5,000 migrants facing eviction starting this this weekend, according to Borderless Magazine.
Chicago has seen the arrival of more than 36,000 migrants seeking asylum since August 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started busing them to places that identified as “sanctuary cities,” including Chicago, New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
The city has recently closed four of its emergency migrant shelters as some occupants have found their own housing and as the pace of new arrivals has slowed.
That progress could be negatively impacted by the 60-day eviction policy, Vasquez said. It could push asylum seekers into homelessness, which will strain the city’s systems of care — which were already struggling to address unhoused people before the first buses with migrants arrived, Vasquez said.
“And this will be front and center on streets, viaducts, highways, parks, ward offices and police stations while more buses with asylum seekers come in between now and the Democratic National Convention,” Vasquez said.
Siri Chilukuri contributed reporting to the article.
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