Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s budget that he passed last
November deliberately underfunded programs for asylum-seekers. The meager
appropriation authority could be exhausted by April, but nobody knows yet what
the city plans to do when it reaches that point.
Also last November, Gov. JB Pritzker made it clear to reporters
that, “the state doesn’t run shelters,” and said he was waiting for the city to
recommend shelter sites. “The state doesn’t control property in the city of
Chicago that could provide a location. The city really has to do that.”
Pritzker also criticized the city for not asking the General Assembly for
additional money and noted, “We have spent much more money to support the
system of asylum-seekers arriving here than the city has.”
In December, the state declined to fund a huge, 2,000-bed tent
shelter in the city’s Brighton Park neighborhood after an evaluation of a city
contractor’s report by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency found that
the remediation completed by the city “did not meet IEPA standards to receive
[a formal letter stating no more mediation was needed] and was therefore not
approved,” an IEPA spokesperson reiterated last week.
The city was furious at the denial, and Mayor Johnson complained
to reporters again last week that the state still has not fulfilled its promise
to open those 2,000 new beds. The state claimed then and has ever since then
that, despite repeated requests, the city has not yet offered up any more
sites. Mayor Johnson told reporters this was not true. I’m still checking on
this.
Also in December, Mayor Johnson announced a program to ticket and
even impound buses carrying migrants to the city from Texas unless drivers
followed rules for when and where their passengers could be dropped off. That
quickly had the effect of forcing the bus companies to dump their human cargo
in the suburbs and exurbs, where they are then directed to public
transportation to Chicago. During the week ending Jan. 19, not a single bus
from Texas arrived directly in Chicago, according to a document released to
city officials.
The city has opened no new migrant shelters since November,
although Chicago officials made it appear as if they were still working on
plans to do so in December, specifically a shelter on the city’s northwest side
at a site owned by the Catholic Archdiocese. Will Chicago still open and
operate that shelter? No. But the city has been hoping that the state and/or
the Archdiocese could open it, and now I’m hearing that the shelter might
possibly go forward.
On Jan.12, city officials went even further and told state
legislators the city had “begun planning for rightsizing” its shelter system.
That’s corporate-speak for “downsizing,” although a city official now says they
probably shouldn’t have used that word.
And then last week, Mayor Johnson told reporters that the state
government “can build a shelter anywhere in the state of Illinois,” adding the
state “does not have to build a shelter in Chicago.”
This, of course, ignores the fact that the migrants’ stated
preference is a Chicago destination. More importantly, it’s also the
politically targeted destination set by the Texas governor. In other words, the
mayor can say what he wants, but they’re coming regardless.
His comment also ignores the fact that the state has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure and caring for asylum-seekers
in Chicago. Expanding that out would be prohibitively expensive and disperse
scarce human resources. There are only so many people who are willing to do the
work and qualified to do it. Dispersing those workers throughout a large
geographic area would make their task a lot tougher. It may be unfair to the
city, but that’s where the infrastructure is.
Not to mention that suburban mayors aren’t exactly falling all
over themselves to take any of these folks in. When a reporter asked Cook
County Board President Toni Preckwinkle last week if any suburban mayors had
taken up her offer to open shelters, Preckwinkle said, “Those conversations
didn't result in offers of assistance.”
It’s becoming more clear almost every day that, despite his
initial promises to welcome the new arrivals with open arms and share with them
the city’s “abundance,” Mayor Johnson’s aim for weeks if not months has been to
pull back from the task of accepting and caring for the continuing influx of
asylum-seekers and return to his progressive agenda, like banning natural gas
connections in most new construction.
Meanwhile, April gets closer every day.
