Mayor Brandon Johnson on Monday called off a trip to the Mexican border and will instead focus on the ongoing migrant crisis creating hardship in Chicago.
Beatriz Ponce de Leon, deputy mayor of immigrant, migrant and refugee rights, will lead a small delegation to four Texas cities that are the primary points of departure for migrants traveling to Chicago by bus and air: El Paso, San Antonio, McAllen and Brownsville.
The group will review operations at federal processing centers and talk with local stakeholders about ways to alleviate “financial and operations challenges” at both ends.
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The team also wants to establish “better lines of communication” about the steady stream of buses now ignoring the city’s 11 p.m. curfew and “share information about extreme housing and weather conditions” now facing the 18,500 asylum-seekers who have already reached Chicago. More than 3,500 migrants are sleeping on police station and airport floors.
Johnson told reporters Oct. 4 that he needed to go “assess the situation” at the Texas border and “see it firsthand.” Since then, he has received criticism for planning the trip.
Cristina Pacione-Zayas, Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, explained Johnson’s reasoning for calling off his trip, saying he saw more value in staying in Chicago to oversee the city’s response to the crisis.
“The fact that we don’t have any beds coming on line in mass quantity, and people are literally being sent to sleep outside,” Pacione-Zayas told the Sun-Times. “And he needs to stay back, closely monitor, and try to solve for this issue of not having enough shelter and people going straight to the ground.
“We want to try to see what kind of contingency plan we can put in place while we’re waiting for our brick-and-mortars,” Pacione-Zayas said, “and also the evaluation of land in terms of the base camps.”
She also pointed to a major shift in population with a lot more single adults coming than families that will require “some reconfiguration of spaces.”
Pacione-Zayas will join the trip that starts Tuesday and ends Friday.
Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd), chair of the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety, said Johnson did the right thing by calling off a trip that “wouldn’t have accomplished anything.”
“They tried to put together an itinerary that would have some substantive meetings as well as photo ops. And for various reasons, it just didn’t seem to come together,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins said the Johnson administration is still struggling to execute the mayor’s plan to open “winterized base camps” to get migrants off police station and airport floors before temperatures plummet.
“That’s harder to do when you’re standing on the banks of the Rio Grande, instead of the banks of the Chicago River,” he said.
Pacione-Zayas said a plot of privately owned land at 38th Street and California in the Brighton Park neighborhood is just one of several under consideration for the cold weather camps. She refused to identify the others, for fear of stirring up opposition unnecessarily.
“Once you open up the ground and you see the sewers and all that kind of stuff, that makes a huge difference. That’s why we can’t announce it being for certain until we see what is actually yielded,” she said.
Questions about Johnson’s decision to earmark just $150 million for the migrant crisis in 2024—when the city is already spending more than $30-million-a-month—dominated opening day of City Council hearings on the mayor’s $16.6 billion budget.
Alderpersons from across the city want the mayor’s budget team to identify “Plan B” if Johnson’s demands for more state and federal support fall on deaf ears.
“Hope isn’t a strategy. What happens we get midway through the year and we don’t have the funds?” said Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), chair of the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), Johnson’s handpicked Finance Committee chair, urged the mayor’s budget team to stop playing hide the ball and start providing the City Council with a “new arrival budget.” She wants an itemized accounting of the $150 million already spent on the migrant crisis and all spending going forward.
“I want to know the amount. I want to know staffing and the source funding so it’s all in one place and we’re not searching under rocks to find where all this money is,” Dowell said.
