A small group of protesters gathered Monday outside the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel, where the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications was hosting the 18th annual National Homeland Security Conference, to demand that the agency improve its emergency response plan to care for the thousands of migrants who recently arrived in Chicago.
“We come to the stages of the OEMC conference, frustrated and ashamed that one of the institutions supposed to ensure the well-being of people in emergencies, today taunts its budget and its non-existent support,” Xanat Sobrevilla, organizer of the community organized against evictions, said at a press conference, which included about 20 volunteers who take care of migrants housed in police stations.
Nearly a year after the first migrant buses arrived in Chicago from Texas in late August 2022, volunteers say the city is struggling to effectively deploy resources to feed and house more than 10,000 asylum seekers. Currently, more than 6,000 asylum seekers are staying in temporary shelters and sleeping on the floors of police stations, in some of which staff and police have been accused of abuse And sexual misconduct against immigrants.
Since March, the Police Station Response Team — which is not affiliated with the police department — has been one of countless Chicagoland volunteer groups tending to what they call the “survival needs” of newcomers living in temporary shelters.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/6TOTA76NJVFDLAL2SMUQ7N3FCE.JPG)
“If volunteers don’t show up at police stations with food and bedding when the next bus arrives, people will go hungry and sleep on cold hardwood floors,” said PSRT volunteer Halle Quezada.
Community organizations and volunteers claim that the OEM is neglecting its duties — which the city website said to include public safety planning and coordination for large-scale events, emergencies and disasters – and demanding that the agency take responsibility for regularly delivering food, providing clothing and safe accommodation for migrants.
The OEM was meeting Monday with government agencies, nonprofits, business owners, universities and other officials on the topic of homeland security, public safety and emergency management. An OEM spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.
“In the absence of this preparation and coordination by the OEM, Chicagoans are providing front line care to people arriving here. We’ve been at it for months and we’re tired,” Quezada said. “We are here today because Chicago deserves a government that can get us through the crisis. Public safety in our communities means people have their basic survival needs met. Public safety means kids who go to school with my kids have a bed to sleep at night.
Quezada’s own children, 8 and 6, held up signs behind her as she spoke. Her children are particularly familiar with the migrant crisis, Quezada told the Tribune, because she has hosted migrants and their families in her own home as they transition to more permanent housing.
( What to know about the migrant crisis in Chicago )
Sobrevilla also highlighted the critical role neighbors, volunteers and local collectives have played in supporting migrants, from managing registrations with immigration and customs to coordinating breakfast, lunch and dinner deliveries to shelters and police stations.
“The arrival of tens of thousands of people forced from their homes and communities to barely survive, to find food, safety and hope, exposed an inadequate system of care in Chicago – a system we had to fix on the fly,” she said. “We will continue to demonstrate our ability to care as human beings, regardless of the state.”
The volunteers are also calling on the city to end its contract with Favorite HealthCare, a Kansas-based agency that provides and operates the city’s migrant shelters. This month, the city The Department of Family and Support Services awarded Favorite a contract worth up to $30 million to continue staffing the city’s 12 shelters.
Referencing reports they have received of alleged abuse at shelters run by Favorite staffers, volunteers say hiring local Chicagoans to run these operations would increase community trust and create a lasting support network for migrants. Favorite HealthCare was not immediately available for comment.
PSRT volunteer Leah Rogers and other critics also say the legal process for seeking asylum is unnecessarily long and creates a dependency on staff instead of increasing self-reliance for these new Chicago residents who are “ready and willing to work and take care of themselves.”
Sobrevilla, herself an immigrant and a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, has lived in the Chicago area for 27 years and has organized against what she calls the “deportation apparatus” for more than a decade.
Even after enduring months of pain, starvation and danger en route to the United States, Sobrevilla said, migrants must have a fighting chance against “a deportation machine” as they try to adjust to life in Chicago.
“To make matters worse, asylum seekers have no (viable) way out of the shelter system because it takes the government over five months to grant them a work permit once they apply for asylum,” Rogers added. “Why isn’t this city allocating money to help people access legal services when applying for asylum and work permits? The City of Chicago has chosen to waste taxpayer dollars on a dependency system with no regard for human dignity, public safety or sustainability.
Quezada said that while the volunteers are tired and in desperate need of the city’s help, people arriving in Chicago seeking asylum are not a burden.
“The total lack of coordination and preparation of our municipal services – that’s the burden,” Quezada said. “These predatory contracts that run away with our taxes and increase suffering – that’s the burden. And a government that, in the absence of care systems, will not allow people to take care of themselves – that is the burden.
AD Quig from the Chicago Tribune contributed.
