Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th) on Monday unleashed his anger at Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to turn the Amundsen Park Fieldhouse into a shelter for 200 migrants for at least six months.
Three days after Taliaferro warned that the burgeoning migrant crisis was bringing historic tensions between Blacks and Latinos to a boil, the situation hit even closer to home.
He was told the Johnson administration plans to open a shelter at Amundsen Park at 6200 W. Bloomingdale Ave. in Galewood. It would be the city’s 22nd migrant shelter.
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Taliaferro has scheduled a community meeting at the field house at 6 p.m. Tuesday to give his constituents an opportunity to join him in venting their frustrations.
“We can’t argue in one sentence, ‘Let’s provide opportunities for youth to get them to stop coming downtown’ and then take those opportunities away from the youth,” Taliaferro, chair of the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee, said Monday. “We can’t take these resources, especially in our underserved communities. This goes against everything that we’re trying to do to reduce violence.”
Taliaferro predicted an overflow crowd — and plenty of “screaming.”
“This is just not a curveball that goes across the plate and becomes a strike. This is a curveball that actually hits the batter,” Taliaferro said.
“We’re taking away opportunities from our young people when we say we want to give them alternatives to going downtown or gathering en masse and doing the negative things that have been done,” he said.
Taliaferro was not appeased when told Chicago Park District programming would move to Rutherford Sayre Park at 6871 W. Belden Ave.
He said “almost all” participating seniors walk to park district programs — and Sayre Park, about a mile and a half to the northwest, is not within walking distance.
After being blindsided by the proposal, Taliaferro said he expressed his outrage directly to Johnson, Johnson’s deputy chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas and Chicago Park District Supt. Rosa Escareno.
Pacione-Zayas said top mayoral aides don’t take the decision to close the field house lightly. She pointed to the meticulous transition plan put in place before converting the Broadway Armory into a shelter for 347 asylum-seekers.
“What we ended up doing is standing them up in the high schools where the majority of the students went and added some additional capacity there in out-of-school time,” Pacione-Zayas said.
“These are all planned transitions. Are they perfect? No. Will everybody be happy? No,” Pacuibe-Zayas said. “This is unprecedented, and there’s two things we don’t control: the buses — in terms of number and frequency. And we don’t control what the federal government does or does not do. What we can control is making sure we don’t have people on the street en masse.”
Volunteers taking care of the crush of new arrivals at police stations agree another shelter is overdue.
“It’s really important people are moved out of these conditions,” said Mimi Guiracocha, a nurse helping new arrivals at her local police station in Bridgeport, who called the use of police stations unsustainable.
The Deering District station where she volunteers was the single most crowded police station in the city last week, according to the Office of Emergency and Communications, with 250 people.
Guiracocha and other Deering volunteers suggested the city is bringing more new arrivals to that station because it has a robust volunteer network, though they said those volunteers “have been worked to the max for far too long.”
Rich Guidice, the mayor’s chief of staff, noted five more busloads of migrants were supposed to arrive Monday after 20 more arrived over the weekend.
“We realize we’re asking our city to take on a lot. But we’re in a bit of a situation here, and we just have to continue to ask for peoples’ patience. … We realize that it does cause a disruption in peoples’ daily lives, but we’re just trying to figure out what some of the best solutions are for this humanitarian mission,” Guidice told the Sun-Times.
“We have well over 2,500 people in our police stations at the moment. One of our priorities is to get them out of there as soon as possible. … We have some brick-and-mortar structures that are coming on board this week and next week that will, hopefully, continue to give us some more relief,” he said.
Taliaferro is one of three members of Johnson’s leadership team opposed to the mayor’s plan to build tent cities — through a $29.3 million contract with the security firm GardaWorld — to get 2,246 migrants, 579 of them minors, off the floors of police stations and O’Hare and Midway airports.
Pacione-Zayas said the urgency has been exacerbated by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent plan to ignore the city’s 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew and send buses to Chicago around the clock. One bus arrived at 1 a.m. Saturday.
“We’ve got some pretty good understanding that he’s going to ignore all of our ... attempts to have some type of management of the situation,” Pacione-Zayas said.
After that early morning arrival, “our people drove around for at least an hour. CPD did some circles. They couldn’t find them. So I don’t know where these buses went,” she said.
“We’re now planning to staff it up. We’re gonna need volunteers, interpreters, health screening, support for out-migration. It’s the responsible thing to do to have it ready for 24/7 receiving.”
Contributing: Michael Loria
