Dropped off in suburb wearing T-shirts and sandals, migrants finally reach Chicago by Metra train
After they missed their train from Glen Ellyn to Chicago early Friday morning, migrants wrapped themselves in thin white blankets on the concrete platform.
They were left at the Metra station after a ride in a large charter bus from El Paso, Texas, and given train tickets by their bus driver. They ran toward a train that was just pulling out of the station, but had gotten there too late. Police said the next train wouldn’t come for five hours.
“It’s so bad,” said 22-year-old Daniel Torres from Maracay, Venezuela, after riding the bus for over 30 hours. “Look at the time we arrived.”
A complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela that has brought record numbers of migrants to the U.S. border is now being twisted into a game of human transport where people are passed off like cargo.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has sent more than 630 buses to Chicago in the past 16 months carrying some 29,000 migrants, as of city data Friday. He began sending migrants on buses from his state to suburbs of Chicago when the city tightened rules in mid-December to ask for more coordination and communication about drop-offs with Texas.
Prior to the city’s rules, buses were coming at all hours of the day and night, without warning. Now, in order to skirt new $3,000 fees issued by the city, they’re doing the same in the suburbs — leaving some migrants in uncertainty and forced to stand or walk long distances outside in the cold.
Friday was the second day in a row Glen Ellyn received a bus, following a wave of nearby municipalities who passed similar ordinances with high fines for sending uncoordinated buses.
30 miles from their destination
At about 12:30 a.m. Friday, the Tribune watched the charter bus from Texas drop off Torres and about 40 other men and women in Glen Ellyn and then drive away. After missing the train, migrants stood outside in subfreezing temperatures wearing cotton T-shirts, pants and sandals.
They told the Tribune they had just spent several days in a detention center in El Paso, one of the world’s largest urban border regions.
Metra services had stopped for the day, so police tried to open the small brick building at the train station to shelter the migrants. It was locked.
Shivering, the asylum-seekers — who had traveled thousands of miles across rivers and mountains to make it to the sanctuary city of Chicago — stood at the station and looked at the yellow strung lights in the quiet suburb, about 30 miles from their destination downtown.
They were puzzled. Glen Ellyn police were also confused, so they called the bus driver.
The group of huddled migrants re-boarded the bus. Several said they were hungry and hadn’t eaten all day.
The bus spent the next few hours driving migrants around the suburbs in the middle of the night — looping through Elmhurst, Lombard and Villa Park — occasionally stopping at gas stations and in strip mall parking lots. Glen Ellyn police cars followed the bus, before driving away when it entered a neighboring suburb.
Several migrants were dropped off on the side of the road to be reunited with family members or friends who picked them up.
At 4:30 am, the bus again dropped migrants off at the Metra station in Glen Ellyn. The bus driver had accidentally bought them weekend passes.
“They’re not valid,” said the woman at the ticket counter, but she let them board the train anyway.
“Caution, the doors are about to close,” said an automated voice over the intercom in English.
The migrants were seated in a private train car and the doors were locked.
“They ended up boarding the train toward Chicago, and there was no further issue. No further incidents,” said a spokesperson from the Glen Ellyn Police Department when asked late Friday morning what had happened.
‘This sense of fear, more than anything’
The majority of migrants at the border have incurred tremendous financial costs to get to the United States and have experienced food insecurity, exhaustion and in some cases exploitation.
“They already have problems knowing who to trust and who not to trust because they have been taken advantage of,” said Luz Maria Garcini, interim director of community and public health at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, whose research focuses on addressing the psychological needs of marginalized communities.
“All of a sudden you’re being bused to a place you know nothing about. You don’t speak the language. Your health and physical state (are) very frail and you don’t have access to health care,” she said.
Heidi Sarmiento, 45, sat on the blue leather train seat with her husband, Josele Mendoza, and recounted the threats and violence they’d experienced in Mexico. Authorities there threatened to take away Sarmiento’s grandchild, she said.
Many migrants arrive through the Customs and Border Protection’s CBP One app — an official mobile application the agency uses to inspect and document arrivals and departures in the United States. But Mendoza, 41, said he and his wife felt they couldn’t survive in Mexico, so they crossed the border in the middle of the night.
“It was this sense of fear, more than anything. Más que todo, fue este sentido de miedo,” Sarmiento said. “It was just insanity.”
The two were separated and detained for three days, and said they had reunited by a miracle and were able to come to Chicago on the same bus.
But Sarmiento’s daughter and three grandchildren had entered with the app, she said, and she had no idea where they were or how to find them. Her daughter’s phone had been taken by detention officers in El Paso.
Early Friday morning, Mendoza was feeling feverish, and his wife gently held his head on her shoulder. She leaned down and kissed the back of his neck. He worked as a welder in his home state of Falcón but left due to growing shortages of food and basic supplies.
‘We carry those experiences’
There is no quick fix for Venezuela’s economy, which has tanked due to a combination of falling crude oil prices and an authoritarian regime under President Nicolás Maduro.
The number of encounters between Venezuelan nationals and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency officials shot up from 50,499 in 2021 to 334,914 in 2023 — as Venezuela’s internal crisis has spilled out into neighboring countries and up to the United States.
Some experts say politicians like Gov. Abbott are using the soaring border crossings for political gains, but border towns are also being strained by a record high number of crossings.
Migrants on the train expressed gratitude to have a ride into a city that promises shelter and resources, despite their earlier stop in Glen Ellyn.
In the softly lit train car, they recounted the uncertainty and desperation they felt riding on top of trains in Mexico.
Tony Suarez, 32, from the northern Carabobo state of Venezuela, said he saw a baby fall from the top of a train and die. He said he spent eight days in the detention facility in Texas.
“People don’t understand how we carry those experiences in our minds. It almost makes you go crazy,” he said.
He held his forehead tightly and looked at a video on his phone of migrants stacked up on the fast-moving, metal train that runs through Mexico that they call “La Bestia.”
They talked in low voices and watched as buildings formed in the tinted windows outside.
‘Not accustomed to this cold’
The train slowed to a stop and the migrants exited, still wrapped in thin white blankets. They held their belongings in plastic bags they’d been given at the detention facility.
“You guys made a long trip,” said a Metra officer who greeted them.
They still had a lot of questions.
“What will our next steps be? Will there be food there? Is there heat?” they asked.
The officer brought them down a flight of stairs, lined them up and gave them a paper with basic directions to get to the city’s “loading zone” for migrant intake at 800 S. Desplaines St. in the West Loop.
The group set off alone down West Madison Street in the freezing Chicago air, holding the map. They had no idea where they were going and got lost. They walked for almost half an hour.
“It’s beautiful there. I’ve never been in a place like this,” said Jordin Benitez, 29, from the northwestern Trujillo state of Venezuela.
He lit a cigarette and took a selfie on a highway overpass.
Sarmiento said her whole body hurt from the cold. She walked closely next to her husband and blew on her hands to keep them warm.
“I’m not accustomed to this cold. I want a hot coffee,” she said.
When the migrants arrived at the Office of Emergency Management’s staging ground, they were told to line up in the parking lot outside and were given thin blue blankets wrapped in plastic. They quickly tore open the packaging and draped the blankets over their shoulders.
With so many asylum-seekers arriving over the past few weeks, the city has had to put overflow migrants in warming buses to sleep while they wait for shelter.
As of Friday morning, there were 151 migrants temporarily staying in warming buses at the city’s loading zone.
Sarmiento and her husband said they had chosen between going to New York, Denver and Chicago. They’d heard Chicago had more resources, and thought they were walking to shelter. They’d walked for over three months.
After finally arriving in Chicago, looking for recourse, they were brought to another crowded bus.
