Editorial: Housing migrants in Chicago police stations was a disaster waiting to happen

Chicago’s police stations fulfill multiple functions in their districts: They’re workplaces for officers and administrators, holding pens for criminal suspects, offices for detectives trying to solve crimes and locations where this teeming city’s citizens go to report their myriad worries and problems.

They never were designed to be shelters for migrants.

So it’s hardly surprising that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s decision to continue to direct Chicago’s migrants to, in essence, take up residence alongside sergeants’ desks has not been going well.

Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs, both of which have plenty to do in the best of times, have been forced to investigate a claim of sexual interaction between a CPD employee and a temporary resident at one of the stations.

On Tuesday, COPA said that it had not found a victim willing and able to come forward and state for the record that such a thing happened, but that in the course of its investigation of one complaint, it uncovered another claim of what was, at best, inappropriate behavior and potentially something even worse. We’ll bet that’s not the last one, either.

What a mess.

It’s hardly surprising that any potential victim in this situation was unwilling to come forward, given that most of the migrants in Chicago have asylum cases in the works and likely would worry about the potential consequences of any such attention. But the underlying issue here is that migrants should never have been housed in the police stations in the first place.

Who thought housing hundreds of migrants in several police stations was a good idea? Who thought that subjecting public safety employees to such a workplace situation was in any way fair to them?

We’ve said before that Republican border-state governors sending migrants to Democratic strongholds and avowed “sanctuary cities” like Chicago was a cynical ploy, using human beings in personal and economic distress to make a political point. But it certainly has been politically effective, causing a level of chaos on the receiving end as cities like New York and Chicago have to confront the logistics and the massive costs of their hospitality.

New York mostly has put migrants in huge hotels. On Eighth Avenue between 44th and 45th streets, in the heart of the Midtown theater district, stands the 1,300-room Row Hotel NYC, formerly known as the Milford Plaza Hotel, with the classic slogan “The Lullaby of Broadway.” That huge establishment, which before the pandemic charged tourists hundreds of dollars a night, is now home to as many as 5,000 migrants with the city of New York reportedly paying as much as $500 per room per night for its private owners to house them.

To many tourists rushing past to go to a show, the shelter still looks like a hotel, although the sidewalk outside the hotel is always crowded with mostly young people. Migrants often have teenagers who, like any other teenagers, like to get away from their families, let off steam and have fun with their peers. That results in various flashpoints involving sexual activity, drugs, partying, raucous behavior and other areas of conflict that simply are inevitable when large numbers of young people are crowded into one location, especially after being unmoored from their prior communities of friends. And migrant teenagers cannot just get a job, or, at least, they cannot do so legally.

Anyone who walks down Eighth Avenue past the hotel can see, in essence, what those who work in Chicago police stations have been facing in recent weeks.

It’s not that the migrant teens are any different from their American peers; it is more that they have fewer places to go and little or nothing in the way of personal resources to spend when they arrive. Anyone who really has assessed the inherent instability of that situation would conclude that the issues with which COPA and others are dealing were inevitable.

Housing migrants is one of those divisive issues that often boil down to broad public agreement that while decent housing should be provided, it should always be provided in someone else’s neighborhood. Clearly, though, hotels and apartment complexes are vastly preferable to police stations, both for migrants and for the American citizens who work in public safety.

This chaos in Chicago is all a consequence of America’s dysfunctional immigration system, of chronic problems at the border and a general unwillingness on the part of the Biden administration to face its own internal disagreements and come up with a collaborative solution better than having kids sent by Republican governors halfway across an unfamiliar country only to find themselves bedding down for the night in the same building as cells that await suspects.

Johnson should admit this was a terrible idea (a spokesman said Tuesday that responsibility for the plan belonged with Lori Lightfoot’s administration), immediately get the migrants out of these police stations, apologize to the public safety employees and the migrants themselves, and come up with a more humane and workable solution for all concerned.

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Editor’s note: This editorial has been updated to reflect the Johnson administration’s statement that the initial responsibility for the plan rested with the Lightfoot administration.