Chicago will begin issuing notices on Friday for migrants at city-run shelters to vacate the premises within 60 days, in a new policy Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office said reflects the city’s fast-dwindling capacity for its thousands of new arrivals.
The strategy change comes after the mayor teased a new direction earlier this week for his administration’s migrant response, following months of pressure to rein in exorbitant spending on shelters and other costs. It’s a tacit admission there are limits to how much of a welcoming city Chicago can be.
But his team has cast the shift as an urgent measure to ensure those currently camped outside of or on the floors of Chicago police stations while awaiting shelter space will get a bed before the cold sets in.
In addition to the new shelter limits, the city will also begin cracking down on what Johnson’s administration described as “rogue buses” of migrants and beefing up personnel at their initial landing spots to help asylum-seekers relocate to other parts of the country, the mayor’s office said.
“We have finite resources,” Johnson’s deputy chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas, told reporters. “And so we’re just being responsible with, ‘Here’s what we have. Let’s figure out how we can judiciously use it.'”
The exit notices will come in waves, the first one starting Friday for all shelter residents who have been there since last year: about 50 people, according to Department of Family and Support Services Commissioner Brandie Knazze.
Another 60-day warning will be issued Dec. 4 for new arrivals who entered the shelters before August, who total 3,000. The city will send out a third round Feb. 1 for the 8,800 residents who checked in by Thursday, while any migrant who joins the shelter system Friday or after will get a 60-day notice upon intake.
When Johnson first dropped the news of a shelter limit on Wednesday after his first budget passed, he offered scant news beyond affirming his vow to “never sacrifice the needs of Chicagoans in support of those who wish to become Chicagoans.”
Friday’s details signal a shift, though the mayor’s office stressed humane resettlement remains the goal.
“I do think that it’s important for us to recognize Chicago is still a welcoming city, and we haven’t closed our doors,” Beatriz Ponce de León, deputy mayor of immigration, said. “We are doing the best we can with the resources we have. … So I think that this is a good next step for us.”
In a statement, Johnson said that at the end of the 60-day period, migrants in shelters must leave and return to the “landing zone” to place a new shelter request. Those so-called zones have thus far been the floors and sidewalks of Chicago police stations and inside O’Hare International Airport, but the city and state are hoping to erect winterized base camps with cots soon.
Exceptions to the 60-day limit can be made for medical crises, severe cold weather or if they are awaiting an imminent move-in date with an apartment lease.
The plan was met with consternation from migrant shelter residents who fretted over being left out in the cold.
On a bench outside the shelter in the shuttered Wadsworth Elementary in Woodlawn, Alejandro Saldivar cried thinking about his parents and 13-year-old brother who remain in Venezuela. The 19-year-old has been wiring them about $300 a week from odd day jobs — roofing, painting, drywall, shingles, construction, he said.
He does not know how he’d afford a lease given the unpredictable nature of his work.
“They shouldn’t throw people in the streets,” he said. “There are opportunities here that there just aren’t over there, but it’s been so hard.”
Nearby, Alexander Romero, 21, and Luis Carrasquel, 20, stood outside and danced to music blaring from a large speaker.
“Is this not a sanctuary city?” they asked, when they heard the news.
The city’s statement said the changes will come with services to help them attain long-term stability. That includes an expansion of case management and legal services, with a goal of getting nearly 11,000 migrants temporary protective status and work authorization from the federal government by February.
But it was not immediately clear what the city will do if residents refuse to leave shelters. The shelters had a similar, 30-day limit under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but the policy was not enforced as the pace of new arrivals slowed to a crawl until the tail end of her term.
Knazze deflected questions Friday on whether Chicago police officers would be tapped to evict residents.
“That’s a really last resort situation,” Knazze said. “I really can’t say because we have not gotten there yet. So I don’t want to speculate, but the goal really is that people understand what the situation is and that they’re able to have a plan, and we don’t get there.”
The news comes after Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Thursday announced a new $160 million infusion, $65 million of which will be used to set up another tent encampment for migrants operated by the city, to serve as a supplement to Johnson’s pending base camps, while other chunks will go toward a new centralized intake center for new arrivals, case management and other services.
The center’s location is yet to be determined, Illinois Department of Human Services Associate Secretary Kirstin Chernawsky said Friday, though the aim is to trim the population entering the shelters by 10%. The site of the new base camp, which is designed to fit 2,000, is also unclear.
The state also revealed it will begin cutting off a rental assistance program for new arrivals not already in the shelter system and reduce the time limit to three months from six for those already in the city’s shelters. Both Pritzker’s and Johnson’s administrations framed the change as one that will maximize the number of individuals who can get this aid.
Pacione-Zayas said new regulations for incoming buses of migrants will entail capping the number at two buses per hour and scheduling arrivals between the hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday only. Johnson’s statement argued that “rogue” buses have been skirting requests on where, when and how to unload new arrivals and endangered lives.
Bus companies and other entities that violate these rules will be subject to citations, city officials said.
Meanwhile, increased staff at places where migrants are initially dropped off will direct them out of the city, if they so choose, serving to reunite them with family elsewhere as well as “save space in the shelter system,” the mayor’s office stated.
How to care for the 21,300-plus migrants who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022 has become one of Johnson’s biggest conundrums since taking office in May. The challenges that have come with housing the ever-growing migrant population — one that often arrives impoverished after fleeing political violence in Latin America — has at times left him flat-footed.
Johnson’s team, for its part, has noted it cut down on previous migrant shelter staffing deals with an out-of-state company, Favorite Staffing, that racked up towering costs for the city. The mayor’s team also rapidly stood up new bricks-and-mortar shelters over the past six months, bringing the total to 25 active shelters, and has made inroads at chipping away at the volume of migrants sleeping at police stations and the airport: down from a peak of 3,800 this fall to 2,200 as of Friday.
But many advocates say time is running out to find more space before the punishing Chicago winter arrives. And Johnson’s plan to erect base camps for migrants still awaiting shelter space has yet to debut, with no clear time frame on when two pending locations — a lot in Brighton Park and a former Jewel-Osco in Morgan Park — will finish ongoing assessments for site viability.
At the shelter inside the closed Young Women’s Leadership Academy Charter School of Chicago in Douglas, dozens of men gathered on a lawn across the street said there was a sense of panic after hearing about the rental assistance curtailments.
Luis Enriquez, 27, from Barinas, Venezuela, got to the city before August and started a mechanic business so he can send money to his family.
But the possibility of thousands being removed from the shelter into the Chicago winter makes him wary.
“If you came to work, you have to pay your dues,” he said in Spanish. “But renting is hard. They ask for a lot of paperwork. Paperwork we don’t have.”
Chicago Tribune’s A.D. Quig contributed.
ayin@chicagotribune.com
nsalzman@chicagotribune.com
