City ID card event cancellations frustrate migrants desperate for official identification
Before even crossing the U.S. border, Carolina Olachea knew she wanted to be a Chicagoan.
The 38-year-old from Venezuela heard Chicago was a sanctuary city that could grant her the fresh start she yearned for after fleeing a dangerous hometown where people struggle to find food and there are no jobs.
So it only made sense that after recently arriving in Chicago, Olachea and her son joined hundreds of other migrants seeking a special city government-issued ID during an October event at Gill Park on the North Side.
She said the pair camped out two days ahead and took turns switching spots in line for the card, known as a Chicago CityKey, which many new arrivals have used as official identification while their federal asylum applications remain in limbo.
But the morning of the event, it was abruptly canceled as city staffers struggled to keep the crowd that had grown to 1,000 under control.
“I started to cry,” said Olachea, her voice cracking. “We had been awake for almost two days straight, making sure that we kept our place in line, and then all of a sudden it was canceled. … I’m angry and frustrated, but I’m more than anything sad because we are trying to make this work.”
The city clerk, Anna Valencia, has defended the move and her cancellation of similar future events by noting her office’s ongoing need for more staff and other resources, as well as safety concerns given the crowd size that day. But migrants and advocates who spoke with the Tribune said they remain frustrated a popular program designed to help that very demographic of noncitizens has been kneecapped by what they say was poor foresight and funding prioritization.
Another Venezuelan migrant, 41-year-old Leidy Riveros, was also at Gill Park two days early to obtain a CityKey. She couldn’t take turns or wait inside a car because she had come to Chicago alone, so she slept on the sidewalk of the park when she grew too bleary-eyed.
Riveros said as the line swelled, people began cutting in and shouting until more than a dozen Chicago police cars pulled up, and the city called off the event with no replacements announced. She, too, is still in search of a CityKey.
“Can you imagine? We’re all desperate to get this ID,” Riveros said.
Underscoring the intense interest in obtaining the cards, a huge crowd also overwhelmed another CityKey event run by a neighborhood organization last week in Little Village.
The Chicago CityKey launched in 2018 as a Democratic countermove to then-President Donald Trump, a Republican who imposed anti-immigration restrictions while in office. The program, which has helped noncitizens with applying for apartment leases, bank accounts and other services that require an official ID, immediately saw high interest, and demand increased again last year as Chicago emerged from the pandemic.
But now, its own popularity threatens its success as the city sees a rapidly growing asylum-seeker population that is unlikely to slow down anytime soon.
Following the debacle in Gill Park, the city clerk’s office called off the rest of its scheduled neighborhood events known as the Mobile City Hall, where migrants could obtain a CityKey, for the rest of the year, sparking disappointment for the new arrivals seeking a valid form of identification as they attempt to settle into Chicago. Though Mobile City Hall is not the only way to get the ID, it has served as the most well-known and reliable — until now.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Valencia said on the morning of the Gill Park Mobile City Hall, a staff of about 15 of her employees arrived to a crowd of 1,000 and decided to cancel the event after consulting with Chicago police and Park District security.
“It was an impossible situation and could be unsafe for both our residents and staff,” spokeswoman Diana Martinez wrote. “With the continued efforts to send new arrivals to Chicago, we’ve reached a point where we need to reevaluate our open events so that we can move forward efficiently. … At this point, we have exhausted the vast majority of our resources.”
More than 25,220 CityKeys were printed in the program’s first year of operation in 2018, but those numbers dwindled to under 5,000 during 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, the total has crept back up and surpassed 25,200 as of this month. It’s a reality that Valencia recently told aldermen is unsustainable.
“Even before the new arrivals started coming, we already had a demand we could not meet,” Valencia said during an October budget hearing. “And so when the new arrivals started happening, we’re beyond the demand. We’re being crushed.”
About two dozen CityKey events are still set to take place through the end of the year, but they are not scheduled on the clerk’s office’s public calendar as a safety precaution, Martinez said. Instead, those events will take place unannounced at shelters and community organizations.
The cards are also no longer being offered at City Hall downtown.
But Mayor Brandon Johnson’s deputy chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas argued offering CityKeys directly at migrant shelters rather than public events will be a better way of setting up new arrivals with the ID cards, although 2,500 are still sleeping inside Chicago police stations and airports while awaiting placements at shelters.
“Now we actually have CityKey events at shelter locations that are scheduled all throughout the next few months. Those we find to be very helpful,” Pacione-Zayas told reporters last week. “Those are not public events … so that we can avoid some of these situations, because we did hear that some people were trying to sell their place in line, and obviously there’s safety concerns when you have folks traveling from all across the city to one location and then (we) only can service 250 at a time.”
The CityKey ID is printed on the spot after the applicant provides proof of their Chicago residency, birth date and photo. Migrants have used their Department of Homeland Security paperwork, passport, birth certificate, consular card or a letter from a nonprofit temporarily housing them as documentation to qualify.
The card provides many discounts and benefits including serving as a CTA fare card and library card, but perhaps its most important benefit for asylum-seekers is allowing them to apply for apartment leases, bank accounts and other services. It does not allow the cardholder to drive or vote.
Many of Chicago’s 20,700 migrants from the past 14 months are from Venezuela, which does not maintain embassies and consulates operating in the U.S. due to poor diplomatic relations, so the CityKey is even more valuable for those asylum-seekers should their passports expire.
Erika Villegas, a volunteer with the police station response team that seeks to help newly arrived asylum-seekers navigate the challenges they face in Chicago, also knew migrants were willing to camp out for a Mobile City Hall back in June. So she worked with the nonprofit Envision Community Services to host eager applicants overnight so they didn’t have to sleep outdoors while waiting in line for a CityKey on the Southwest Side.
To resort to those measures must mean that families are “so desperate” for the ID, she said.
But beyond its practical uses, obtaining a CityKey has become a symbolic moment for the new arrivals, who long to be independent and feel that they belong in Chicago, Villegas said.
“It’s almost prideful to now have this ID,” Villegas said. “This ID empowers them to be able to get some basic necessities and to adjust into our culture and into our city. … This (cancellation) is a way of keeping people unfortunately in handcuffs, of not being able to start taking those necessary steps to advance. And so it’s disappointing.”
Villegas, who works in real estate, noted the irony of the city’s long-term goal being finding migrants permanent housing while it still cannot keep up with the demand for the CityKeys that many landlords accept as a form of identification for apartment applications. She said back when her grandparents immigrated from Mexico in the 1970s, the landscape was different; they already had a family support system in America and far less red tape when it came to finding jobs and housing.
Another migrant advocate, Sara Reschly, said many of the new arrivals she works with were “really disappointed” that the Mobile City Hall event at Brighton Park was canceled following the Gill Park snafu. One migrant she spoke with recently wanted to call an Uber after earning some money, but his Venezuelan passport expired and the app required him to scan an ID, so he could not get a ride.
“You can’t even imagine all the ways you’d need an updated ID, but there are many, and so not having an ID really prevents people from reaching stability,” said Reschly, deputy director of community services at Brighton Park Neighborhood Council. “It is urgent. I mean, it is fundamental to being able to access services and programs in Chicago.”
With demand so acute, Valencia has proposed an online portal to apply for the ID. Martinez, the spokeswoman, said the documents uploaded would be verified by a program such as LexisNexis, and the CityKey would be mailed out to the applicant once complete. The platform would also take appointments for in-person events so the clerk’s office can plan ahead on capacity.
The clerk requested another $320,000 in next year’s $1.2 million budget for CityKey to build out the website, Martinez said, and secured a compromise of $222,000 from Johnson’s team ahead of this month’s vote on the 2024 budget. Martinez said the remaining funds needed were repurposed from the clerk’s 2023 budget.
“We really, really are asking for some support on this because CityKey is just unmanageable right now,” Valencia told aldermen. “My team is burnt out and exhausted. It’s not sustainable.”
But her office also estimated the online platform won’t be ready until next June. The appetite for the ID cards is not likely to diminish soon — as evidenced by yet another CityKey event that turned chaotic last week.
The partnership with the Little Village Community Council on West 26th Street was promoted by the local organization and not a clerk-run Mobile City Hall event, but about 500 people still showed up and some grew agitated when asked to disperse before the cards ran out.
Migrants once again camped out for days before the event, said Kristian Armendariz, one of the organizers. Even after staff left, migrants who couldn’t get their ID refused to leave the premises, she said.
“Some fight against each other because while some camp overnight, others arrive on time or very late when no more spots are available,” Armendariz said. “This causes chaos and frustration.”
Martinez said police were called to Little Village “to be a presence while this was occurring as a precaution,” and a Chicago police spokesperson said a woman reported a simple battery after a person shoved through the crowd and made contact with her infant daughter, but she was not injured and no arrests were made.
“While people raised their voices and had arguments among each other, our staff didn’t witness any other issues,” Martinez said. “Some people began to leave at that time and more people cleared out after our staff left the location, which is often the case because people hold out in hopes of receiving a CityKey.”
Yesenia Pino, 41, got her CityKey last month with her husband after nabbing one of the first spots in line at the crack of dawn.
The ID has been crucial to starting a new life in Chicago, she said. She can now buy medicine and plans to open a bank account. Her husband can buy cigarettes, too.
“It makes me feel safer, because it’s an official ID from Chicago,” Pino said.
