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And throughout, the city has done far less to permanently resettle migrants than to cram them into public buildings and hotel rooms. Chicago now operates 17 shelters, and more than 200 buses have come from the southern border since last August, overwhelming the city’s social support systems.

Johnson has repeatedly set, and missed, deadlines to move migrants out of police stations, where there are more people sleeping now than when he took office. City and state officials have been talking privately for months about opening a recent interim housing facility to take in some of the new arrivals, records show, but they still aren’t ready to go public with those plans.

An ‘onslaught,’ then infighting

The ongoing crisis is an extraordinary challenge with no obvious parallels in recent years.

“Nobody could have been prepared for something like this,” said Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The onslaught was so massive ... that you almost can’t really blame sanctuary cities for being unprepared.”

Yet the city’s and state’s response has been marked by infighting over funding, resources and mutual responsibility. Last September, for instance, city Family and Support Services Commissioner Brandie Knazze texted Chief Operating Officer Paul Goodrich to express frustration during a meeting with Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration: “I’m on the state call and they are pushing us to open more shelters.” She punctuated her message with five face-palm emojis.

In April — eight months into the crisis — state officials wrote a memo critical of the city’s request for more funding, noting the city should “expand shelter capacity,” “immediately begin the development of a triage center” and declare a “disaster to support the allocation of emergency resources.”

The city has also struggled to maintain control in its own facilities and provide safety to migrants and residents near shelters. City documents obtained by the Tribune reveal disturbing incidents: Domestic violence and child abuse. A couple having sex in front of a 13-year old girl, then threatening the child and her parents. A 5-year-old left alone all day without food.

Carrie McKillip of the University of Illinois Extension, who studies disaster preparedness in rural communities, said there’s a difference between a “people disaster” — where groups like the Salvation Army and Red Cross swoop in with well-established plans for immediate but temporary relief — and a “people crisis.”

A people crisis is longer term, with ongoing challenges that are likely to continue straining Chicago’s government.

Lightfoot declined to be interviewed, but a spokeswoman released a statement calling the crisis “man-made” and “intentionally manufactured” by Texas politicians, and she noted that Chicago moved thousands of new arrivals into shelter under Lightfoot’s leadership.

“Until there is federal support for work authorization for new arrivals and an expansion of immigration relief available, receiving cities like Chicago will continue to take the brunt of this crisis,” the spokeswoman said.

The first new arrivals

Two days before the first migrants arrived last year, Goodrich, the city’s COO at the time, texted Lightfoot, “No bus tonight.”

But city leaders were bracing themselves. They coordinated with federal, state and county officials. They looked for space to house people in churches and other structures. Illinois Deputy Gov. Sol Flores emailed city officials Aug. 31 to assure “the state is poised to help in anyway possible, please keep us closely engaged.”

That day, two buses arrived at Union Station with 76 people. Lightfoot rushed to greet them.

“We’re ready. We are the village,” Lightfoot declared the next day. “And we are going to make sure that whoever comes to Chicago, that we are going to take care of them, that they are going to find shelter here and that they are going to be welcomed. And we will do whatever it takes to make sure that their rights are respected.”

Immigrants have been drawn to Chicago throughout its history, but its status as a sanctuary city began under its first Black mayor, Harold Washington, whose “Don’t Ask” policy in 1985 banned city officials from inquiring about citizenship. Mayor Rahm Emanuel expanded the designation through his “Welcoming City” ordinance in the early 2010s. Lightfoot broadened protections further in 2021, prohibiting police from cooperating with federal deportation efforts.

State laws have also been enacted to protect immigrants: Local jails are prohibited from housing federal immigration detainees, and the state offers Medicaid-style health insurance to many adults who are in the country without legal permission, among other efforts. Pritzker has repeatedly touted his desire for Illinois to be “the most welcoming state” in the country.

Chicago’s promise of sanctuary has crashed into the reality of limited resources and past disinvestment.

“Although we say we’re a welcoming city, we’re not actually built as a welcoming city, and that work has never really been done,” said 40th Ward Ald. Andre Vasquez, who chairs the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights and supports efforts to create more infrastructure to care for migrants and the homeless.

Last fall, when the first wave of buses arrived, Lightfoot officials worked with faith-based groups and nonprofits to help. They organized health screenings and worried about keeping the locations of migrant housing secret so they weren’t “overrun by press.”

Soon, officials had bigger problems. Despite weeks of notice that buses were arriving elsewhere, there was a scramble to house migrants. Officials rushed to find overnight shelter volunteers. Migrants, mostly from Central and South America, needed CTA cards, mobile phones and CityKey cards, a city-issued government ID that provides various benefits.

There were two shelters in operation at first: Salvation Army Freedom Center and Shield of Hope, both in Humboldt Park. Almost immediately, there was a space crunch. The city was housing 153 people and had only 36 beds.

In early September, the city started considering temporary housing at the High Ridge YMCA, to be operated at a cost of $42,000 per week, plus additional housing expenses, by Favorite Staffing, a company the city had hired during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that rate, the cost would’ve been $2 million per year.

The city also started looking at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy on the South Side, the Public Safety Training Academy on the West Side and a Holiday Inn at 73rd Street and Cicero Avenue.

As more buses rolled in over Labor Day weekend, the state stepped in to find hotel rooms to accommodate some of the arrivals, sparking criticism from the Republican mayor of west suburban Burr Ridge.

Officials agreed that the state would manage families with children, single women, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups, while the city would take primary responsibility for other individuals.

“There was not a lot of, ‘Oh, let’s game this out over the next even three months,’” said Flores, the deputy governor. “It just sort of became like, ‘Where can we find a block of rooms? ... What hotel will work with us? What local mayor will be friendly to the response?’”

State officials were able to draw on some of their experiences and connections from welcoming a wave of Afghan refugees earlier last year, but the differences in the situations quickly became apparent.

“Those Afghans came with a whole other set of federal resources that that this group of folks did not have,” Flores said.

Goodrich received a text on Sept. 7 telling him most migrants “do not stay long as they quickly find some family friends to move in with.” That hasn’t been the case in Chicago, where some migrants have remained in shelters for months, and many lack close connections in their new home.

Since the first asylum-seekers arrived, city officials have considered more than 200 sites for housing them, including the former Englewood Whole Foods, a Mars factory on the West Side that’s closing, a Veterans Affairs hospital building and vacant schools and movie theaters. At times, the city has warehoused migrants in the basement of Harold Washington Library Center.

The city has also repeatedly placed migrants in government-owned buildings and then relocated them to private hotels and hostels. In November, the city moved asylum-seekers from the North Town Branch Library to the Parthenon Hostel. In April, the city took migrants from Truman College and sent them to Social Club, a shelter in the Loop. The city repeatedly sent migrants to Leone Beach Park field house in West Ridge, removed them and then brought them back.

Ald. Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, 33rd, said the lack of shelter space and reliance on private contractors highlights gaps in the city’s social safety net.

“It says that we have defunded all of our structures of care, and we don’t have a sustainable way to take care of people in the city,” Rodriguez Sanchez said.

Outsourcing shelter staffing, for a price

With shelters quickly filling up, the city immediately turned to Favorite Staffing, a Kansas-based emergency staffing company whose revenue shot up to $1.3 billion after entering into contracts with hospitals and governments across the nation during the pandemic. Illinois alone has paid Favorite Healthcare Staffing, nearly $177 million since 2020 for COVID-related expenses, according to the state comptroller.

In a written response to a Tribune inquiry, Favorite Staffing Vice President Keenan Driver did not address specific questions on its costs but said the company “has provided emergency response staffing for more than 15 years and responded successfully to situations such as natural disasters, pandemics and immigration support throughout the United States. Favorite has developed a world class staffing model that delivers care rapidly but also focuses on employee safety and satisfaction.”

So far, the city has set aside an estimated $144 million on migrant care this year. (About $30 million of that is FEMA funding that still requires City Council approval this month.) More than $75.8 million was allocated to Favorite Staffing to provide shelter personnel through June, and records show about $56 million has been paid out as of last week.

The state, meanwhile, devoted more than $200 million to the effort in the budget year that ended June 30, including $50 million sent directly to the city.

A little over a week after the first bus came to Chicago, the number of new arrivals increased nearly fivefold. Refrigerators were donated. Overnight shifts were increasingly hard to fill. Buses were ordered for “decompression” efforts at landing zones and shelters. Medical needs stacked up: medication, distribution, referrals, case management, translation. Coordination calls. Transportation. Overnight translators.

In hasty efforts to coordinate among state, county, city and nonprofit partners, an operations center opened at the city’s emergency management offices. A multiagency resource center — or MARC, as it is referred to in internal documentation — opened at North Park Village Nature Center.

On Sept. 14, to expedite the state’s response and seek help from the federal government, Pritzker issued a state disaster proclamation — but, controversially, only applied it to migrants who arrived by bus from Texas.

Kevin Sur, a public information officer for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security, said he’d never seen anything like the mass movement of people on buses from Southern states to Chicago.

“Every day was a new challenge with many issues to address and solve,” he said. “The asylum-seekers’ arrival into Illinois was something that no place else in the country was seeing. Even New York had a slightly different mission with different challenges.”

As the number of arrivals surpassed 600, the National Guard deployed 34 members to manage and operate a new shelter at the High Ridge YMCA. Hotels near O’Hare housed even more migrants.

The city was strained. Cook County Health could help only 100 clients per day. Contracts with three transportation companies were signed. The Latino Caucus lobbied the White House and Democratic National Committee for additional support, including refugee benefits, to no avail.

‘100% full’

By October, nine shelters were in operation around the city, and requests for housing space expanded to other Chicago Park District facilities, libraries and Chicago Public Schools. As the number of new arrivals surpassed 3,000 in mid-October, enrollment of migrant children in CPS surpassed 100.

Transporting children to school also became an ongoing issue. Migrants repeatedly enrolled their children but couldn’t find a way to get there.

Lightfoot announced $5 million would be set aside as contingency funding to respond to new waves of arrivals. City officials also took an “on-the-ground mission to the border area,” though it’s unclear whether it led to any results.

Migrants were assigned to shelters based on whether they were single or in families or had specific medical requirements. On various occasions, the city “decompressed” shelters and police stations for large city events like the Chicago Marathon.

In mid-October, Knazze, the DFSS commissioner, sent an email to state officials essentially putting out a “no vacancy” sign for the city’s shelters.

“As you are aware, our alternate shelter system is 100% full as we have expanded our capacity at every location,” she wrote. “At this time we are unable to shelter any additional people. ... If a bus arrives starting tomorrow or thereafter, what location outside of Chicago would you like us to direct the bus?”

State officials offered some additional hotel sites they “would consider co-governing” with the city but encouraged Chicago officials to continue pursuing closed big-box stores as potential shelters.

“That seems more sustainable,” Illinois Department of Human Services Director Grace Hou wrote to Knazze.

Knazze responded that, with one exception, “we are not in a position to manage hotel options outside of Chicago.”

On Oct. 17, she wrote to state officials again, telling them two buses with 93 people aboard were headed for the city, which had no space left to house them. “We will need direct state support to receive these individuals,” she wrote.

Despite the simmering tensions between city and state officials, there were community members ready to help: A donor unnamed in public records catered hot meals for Thanksgiving. The city received 1,000 coats from Amazon. The Bears partnered with the Salvation Army to hold a Christmas party for families staying at two shelters. Team members also provided gifts and gave away tablet computers.

But the problems were only getting worse heading into the holiday season.

‘This is insane’

The crisis led to a critical conflict between Lightfoot and Pritzker behind the scenes that escalated dramatically in December. City Hall was gripped with concern about contracts ending by the end of the year and ongoing frustrations with Pritzker’s lack of support. The city was also frustrated that the state was “unwilling to provide the same level of assistance to ‘walk-in’ asylum-seekers” as those arriving by bus.

Goodrich, the city’s COO, received a text complaining that the state welcomed three families at O’Hare and dropped them off near Garfield Park on the West Side, “which is inappropriate.” Mike McPeak, of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, told the city that the state “calls the shots, and has stated they are no longer sheltering new people,” according to the text, whose sender was blacked out.

“This is insane,” the complaint said. “We can’t take their hand-offs plus a bus load of people. We need to talk to them.’”

While the state was not providing shelter in hotels for migrants who arrived at the airport, the governor’s office disputed the claims in the text message.

In late December, Lightfoot held a budget meeting with her staff to discuss funding. She later sent state officials a letter requesting $53.5 million to help support migrants, noting Pritzker’s administration had told the city that the state was “out of funds and will no longer be able to support city migrant services efforts as of February 1, 2023.”

“We are simply unable to provide migrant services at today’s levels after February 1, 2023 if the state withdraws its financial support,” Lightfoot wrote.

State officials received the letter coolly, with the General Assembly instead providing $20 million. When the city asked another time for $61.7 million, the state granted just $10 million.

When state lawmakers finalized the budget for the fiscal year that began July 1, they authorized another $42.5 million for the effort, but specified that it would be available to municipalities and counties across the state. In response to calls for more direct funding to the city, the Pritzker administration has repeatedly pointed to the money the state has spent directly on the response and called for more federal resources.

In January, Lightfoot hired Andrew Velasquez, a high-ranking Department of Aviation official, to be in command of the operation. It was the first time someone was formally in charge.

That month, Rogers Park Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, received a call from her local police leaders asking about migrants who’d shown up at the police station with a map. The city had directed shelters to send migrants to the nearest emergency room or police station.

Hospitals quickly rebuffed migrants, but the cold tile floors of local police districts soon provided refuge to families.

The shortage of shelter beds led to extended delays in the 311 shelter request process. And thousands of migrants were in desperate need of social, medical and legal services.

Hadden said she doesn’t fault Lightfoot officials for how they handled the early phases of the crisis, when everything was in flux. But, she said, City Hall failed to adapt as time went on, particularly during the early part of 2023 when few buses arrived for several months.

“The first mistake was the city didn’t do anything different. We didn’t respond any differently than we had been responding,” Hadden said, adding there was “lost time from January through May ... where we could have been adapting or doing something different or preparing our communities for the reality where their park districts are closed down and their City Colleges are needed, but that was not the approach under the previous administration.”

During that period, the state also was working to move migrants out of hotel rooms, sometimes with the help of a newly established rental assistance program for asylum-seekers.

The hotel population peaked at more than 2,000 at the end of last year across a dozen Chicago-area hotels, and state records show all the migrants had moved out by early May. Hou, Illinois’ human services director, “unequivocally” stood by the state’s decision to no longer house arriving migrants in hotels, even as more recent arrivals are left to sleep on police station floors.

“We do not have the bandwidth as a state to at this time just turn on a hotel … system for the unhoused population,” Hou said in a recent interview, noting that caseworkers had to be pulled from their regular duties to staff the previous hotels around the clock.

Poor conditions at shelters

The former Wadsworth School in majority-Black Woodlawn became a particular focus for Lightfoot because it has a capacity of “up to 1,000 clients.” As early as October, her administration began making repairs potentially to open the building. They didn’t reach out to local Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, until the plan was already in motion.

Taylor and others in the neighborhood were outraged — not, they said, because they opposed the migrants, but because of the city’s plans to repurpose a school that the community had fought to keep open.

Johnson’s administration has also been criticized for how it’s rolled out new shelter announcements, including at the Broadway Armory in Edgewater and at the Lake Shore Hotel in Kenwood. Ald. Desmon Yancy, 5th, complained that City Hall didn’t consult the community.

The Wadsworth shelter opened in February, despite continuing complaints from Woodlawn residents that it would strain their under-resourced neighborhood. Since then, there have been reports of drug contraband and violent altercations. Neighbors have complained about trash piling up outside, cars parked on private property and migrants jumping over fences into backyards.

In April, two Wadsworth residents had an altercation, and were warned further incidents could result in their removal. “Some residents refused to come into the shelter and observe the curfew. They stayed beyond the fence line, and when returning at 2:50 AM they told staff they can remain outside as long as they want to, that they have a right to come and go as they please,” one report noted.

The laundry provider at Wadsworth lost 76 bags of laundry. Squirrels started entering the building through open windows. In another incident, a resident threatened to stab other migrants. At North Park Village, there were ants in the men’s bathroom.Cooling systems have at times failed to work properly at Social Club, Inn of Chicago or Wadsworth.

There have been far more issues at shelters across the city, documented in OEMC reports obtained by the Tribune. Records show shelters have an extreme lack of infrastructure to regulate conditions inside, little privacy, contractors who in some cases mistreated migrants and inadequate medical care, according to internal reports.

One migrant told the staff at the North Park Village shelter “the food they were receiving is prisoner food.” The resident “implied the staff makes $1,000 per hour and chose to feed the residents only sandwiches.” One resident at Gage Park had a toy gun and demanded a meal after hours. At Wright College, a black Cadillac Escalade was trying to lure women out by offering employment and donations.

Another report from April 14 said a resident “complained about a staff member reaching into her jacket pocket to see what items she had in her pocket. Staff reviewed (surveillance footage) and accusation appeared true. Staff were counseled by shelter staff on proper search protocols.”

An April 24 report from Wadsworth, which began performing routine bag checks for security, said one resident was counseled for attempting to bring in a bag of marijuana and another for alcohol.

An April 29 report from the Inn of Chicago said a male “threw and kicked child on the stomach.”

“At 9:15 p.m., male resident slapped female resident in the face,” read a report from May 2, at the Social Club.

The close quarters also compounded medical problems that included scabies, vomiting, fevers, rashes, chickenpox and lice. Pregnant women shared cramped spaces. Shelters, which imposed curfew violations on asylum-seekers, had to deal with behavioral violations on top of food, transportation and other logistics.

Other tragedies unfolded: One resident cried after learning his 12-year old son died in a car accident back home. “Staff spoke to him and let him sleep in office.”

A new mayor inherits the crisis

In February, Lightfoot lost her bid for reelection when she failed to make the runoff, which Johnson went on to win in April; he was sworn in May 15. Though discussion of migrants surfaced throughout both phases of the race, few foresaw how rapidly the situation would come to define the first months of Johnson’s term.

The city had not received any new migrant buses since January, but on May 5 officials reported arrivals were expected to resume.

“Texas has 25 buses lined up,” a city report said.

By early May, there were 430 migrants in police stations. Lightfoot declared a state of emergency days later.

Johnson made a point to visit two sites housing migrants, the Pilsen police station and Pietrowski Park respite center, on his first day in office. But he had no concrete solutions to share.

As the crisis worsened in coming weeks, the new mayor sought to maintain optimism while pointing out his short time in office. And to be sure, his administration did not have much to work with.

In an interview, Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, told the Tribune that it is “gut-wrenching” to see the state of some Chicago Public Schools campuses — the type of buildings the city would later explore but turn down as possible respite sites for migrants.

“When I would go visit schools and see the ceilings crumbling, and see leaks and the paint peeling and playgrounds that are just completely busted, I would get so angry. Like, how can we let things get this way?” said Pacione-Zayas, a former state senator. “There are a ton of buildings in disrepair that are public buildings, and it is shameful that we have inherited that. But I put it all the way back multiple administrations.”

Despite the ongoing challenges, state officials say there’s been a marked change in the working relationship with the city since Johnson took over.

“The folks that work in city government are very dedicated, very focused public servants, and I have an immense amount of respect for them,” said Flores, the deputy governor. “And they were led by an administration that ... chose to not act.”

She added, “We spent so many hours working on plans ... and it was quite frustrating when we could not advance the planning with the former administration.”

Nubia Willman, who led Chicago’s Office of New Americans under Lightfoot and later was her chief of community engagement, called Flores’ comments “both unfortunate and not a fair representation of our work.” She continued: “But moreover, I’d hope she would agree that instead of finger-pointing, we should all be focused on working together to do everything we can to support the new arrivals.”

In June, the Johnson administration said it was preparing to seek proposals for a community-based model for providing services to migrants that could also cut down on current high costs of contractual shelter staffing. The city also said it would spend $25 million to provide six months of rental assistance for more than 6,500 migrants.

Though the mayor knocked Favorite Staffing, the Kansas contractor, in June for charging “not necessarily economically feasible” rates, his administration authorized two extensions of its contract with the city for migrant staffing: one $16 million agreement signed days after his inauguration, and another totaling $30 million signed on July 14.

Pacione-Zayas said, again, that the previous mayor’s team tied their hands. But she said getting the request for proposal out in “60, 70 days” was “warp speed” and “kind of unheard of in city government.”

“The emergency declaration that the previous mayor administered pretty much was performative. It did not allow for any kind of flexibility in procurement in the same way that the state has been able to allow and fast-track contracts,” Pacione-Zayas said. “If we would have cut that contract, we wouldn’t have had any staff. … So it was sort of a stopgap measure.”

To the federal officials, she has a warning. And a deadline: August 2024.

“The investment is minuscule, yet it’s precisely their responsibility,” Pacione-Zayas said. “If folks are not going to get on board because of the moral imperative, I think there would be some self-interest given that the Democratic National Convention is going to be hosted here and Chicago is going to be a spotlight.”

Her boss’s messaging ramped up in urgency too when Johnson sent up his first flares at a news conference last week to President Joe Biden’s administration that the situation “cannot go on” as is.

As reporters shouted questions about how it came to this, the mayor didn’t respond directly, referencing instead a “good conversation” with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and again noting his short time in office: “I became mayor 107 days ago.”

Then he dipped out to greet first lady Jill Biden on the tarmac of O’Hare during her visit that day. Inside the airport, almost 400 migrants were camped out. Another 1,650 were inside Chicago police stations.

Meanwhile, emails between city and state officials in July show a former CVS store was under consideration as an interim housing facility, but state officials wouldn’t say where it will be or when its doors will open. The state has a $125 million contract with Virginia-based GardaWorld Consulting for “turn-key shelter and essential services to be provided as part of migrant arrival operations,” but so far the state has paid GardaWorld less than $2,000.

The Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, which represents local leaders in the Chicago region, is preparing to review applications from towns seeking a piece of the $42.5 million in state funding set aside to provide shelter, food, health care and other services for asylum-seekers. The group is expected to dole out the funds, which can be used for expenses going back to July 1, by the end of September.

One family from Colombia said they’ve been staying at Chicago’s North Park Village migrant shelter for more than four months. They haven’t been connected with rental assistance and have struggled to navigate the byzantine asylum process. And shelter staff members have at times tossed their food and belongings, said Amparo Cubides, 50, as she watched her grandchildren play with stuffed animals.

The family said they knew they couldn’t have stayed in their homeland. But they wondered when — or if — this limbo in Chicago would ever end.

“We don’t have anything. Not money, or work,” Cubides said in Spanish. “We’re just waiting.”