Volunteers feel shut out of city meeting on migrants, meanwhile move is made to new shelter at Daley College
Volunteers were disappointed by a lackluster city response at a meeting Monday night to their request to enter temporary city-run shelters starting this week, following months of not being able to get inside the buildings that house nearly 10,000 migrants who have come to Chicago since August.
Collaboration efforts between volunteers and city officials came to a head when the city hosted a closed meeting to respond to a letter sent by the Police Station Response Team, a network of volunteers providing support and resources to migrants sleeping on the floors of police stations as they wait for placement in shelters.
About 30 response team volunteers were watching the online meeting, and many said afterward they had hoped for more cooperation from the incoming administration and more transparency about what is happening inside shelters contracted by the city’s private vendor Favorite Staffing.
At the meeting, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, said it is difficult to move quickly from contractually based staffers to community based teams, according to a transcript from the Zoom recording sent to the Tribune by a volunteer who attended. Pacione-Zayas said cooperation with volunteers might be easier on a state level than a city level, according to the transcript and confirmed by attendees.
Pacione-Zayas, who recently resigned from the state Senate, did not return a phone call or emails for comment Tuesday.
Conditions inside shelters have reportedly become more crowded and unbearable over the months since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, initially began sending migrants to Chicago, touting the city’s “sanctuary” status as justification to bus families and children and pregnant women here by the hundreds.
Those inside shelters are forced to sleep “lined up almost like dead bodies,” a migrant at a temporary shelter in Woodlawn told the Tribune over three weeks ago. And while dozens of volunteers have formed groups to bring meals and resources to people staying in police stations, they said it’s been hard to provide substantive care because they aren’t allowed inside any of the city shelters.
On Tuesday, volunteers who have developed friendships with migrants were visibly emotional as two CTA buses loaded with migrant families exited the parking lot of the shelter at High Ridge YMCA in West Ridge bound for a new shelter at Daley College in West Lawn. More than a dozen volunteers, members of 50th Ward United Working Families, waited for hours outside after hearing the families would be transferred.
Edgar Roa, a father of one who has been at the YMCA for more than a month, said he hopes the new space “is more spacious.” Roa said he was thankful for those who have been helping ensure he and his fellow asylum-seekers had all their necessities while at the shelter.
”Son muy buenas personas,” he said in Spanish on a phone call as he rode a bus to the college. “They are good people.”
The letter to the city from the volunteers was a cry to action, they said. Sent last Wednesday, it urges the city to work directly with the response team to address acute needs of new arrivals.
“As your team devises new strategies, sets policies, establishes processes, and spends millions of taxpayer dollars, you must rely on the extensive earned experience of this front line network,” volunteers wrote.
Besides providing a list of hundreds of volunteers who have stepped up to help at various police stations, it details the numerous benchmarks they say the city has failed to meet in shelters in recent months: three regular meals a day, coordinated medical care, transparency, a system of reporting mistreatment and legal education.
“We plan on ensuring the city uses our firsthand knowledge as one of many voices poised to inform better care for both migrants and Chicago’s unhoused,” Britt Hodgdon, a response team volunteer at the 2nd and 3rd District stations, told the Tribune after the meeting. “To do this well, the city will have to learn to flex from some well-worn habits.”
There are organized volunteer “leads” at all major shelters around the city, and volunteers hoped the meeting would help establish a credential system to allow a select few volunteers to enter and drop off food, medical resources and clothes inside for migrants. Many migrants haven’t changed in weeks, are forced to sleep on the floor and are being given food in bad condition such as “moldy lunch meat,” according to Heather Nichols, a member of the response team.
Multiple volunteers who watched the meeting said it left them feeling like the city has no real plan to use the $51 million recently approved by aldermen to spend on migrant care through June. The city is getting about $10.6 million and the state about $19.4 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use toward shelter and services.
At a news conference Monday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said his office is in direct communication with nonprofits in Texas that are sending asylum-seekers to Chicago.
“We’re doing as much as we are asked to do, as much as we can do to try to provide help at the local level in the city so that people have food, clothing, shelter, the basic needs — health care — that they need,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker acknowledged that this is a national problem that requires comprehensive sweeping immigration reform. In the meantime, he said, he has asked national authorities to at least help migrants get work permits.
Nichols said the meeting left her unsettled. She said while she appreciates Mayor Johnson’s openness to talk to people on the ground doing real work with migrants, city officials “did not respond to our concern in any meaningful way.”
She said the four city officials in attendance spent the majority of the hourlong meeting going over what is being done with contractors at different shelters around the city, and then when they did have time to briefly talk about solutions to volunteer concerns, they had none.
“The city of Chicago at the request of Mayor Brandon Johnson is working on a volunteer plan to grant access to individuals and organizations looking to provide programming and support to new arrivals,” said Office of Emergency Management and Communications spokesperson Mary May in a statement to the Tribune before the meeting. “This will include a process to ensure all volunteers are background checked, vetted, and trained prior to interacting with families and adults inside of our shelters.”
May confirmed only agencies with delegate or subdelegate contracts with city agencies are currently able to serve migrants inside shelters.
“The priority of our mission is to ensure new arrivals are safe and getting their needs met. We are looking forward to the opportunities that these new partnerships will bring for new arrivals and our shelter staff,” the statement said.
According to the meeting transcript, city officials said that conversations between the city and volunteers will be ongoing. The city has reactivated community briefings every other week and the next briefing is June 26, according to the transcript.
Tim Noonan, a volunteer at the 22nd station, said a group of volunteers in his neighborhood organized a resource rollout effort during the pandemic, and it worked. They have a working blueprint ready to implement, he said, but they just aren’t allowed to use it.
“Our community involvement doesn’t cost (the city) anything. The community is picking up work so they don’t have to,” he said.
Tribune attempts to enter nine city-run shelters have all been met with pushback. Numerous volunteers from the response team said even those trying to get medical resources into city sites were chastised by security.
Noonan said he tried to donate air mattresses to a shelter at Piotrowski Park, but couldn’t because there were 100 people sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the floor and the mattresses were too large to cram inside.
“It’s a black box. You can’t get in there,” he said. “This is not the way to treat people. We’re really treating these people like cattle,” he said.
For now, volunteers continue to dish out hot meals on the sidewalks outside city-run shelters. At Inn of Chicago, the largest temporary shelter in the city, families lined up Monday evening to pick up donated warm containers of food from Chi-Care, a nonprofit that serves homeless communities across Chicago.
Faraz Sardharia, chef and owner of Tandoor Char House and executive committee member of Chi-Care, has been distributing meals to shelters around the city since early May, he said.
“The food migrants are getting is not nutritional. It’s almost like prisoner food,” he said.
On Tuesday morning at Inn of Chicago, response team member Sorsha Urquiza said she tried to deliver clothes to families at the shelter during her lunch break.
“I was immediately asked to leave by an employee,” she said. “And they were very, very rude.”
Urquiza said she has heard reports of migrants’ phones being broken by employees, of women unable to access sanitary supplies, of families whose children are hungry because the food is too spicy and more. She finds it disturbing that she can’t deliver basic needs, she said.
But there were signs by Tuesday afternoon that change was coming.
At Daley College, 50th Ward United Working Families member Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle waited for the families to welcome them to their new home. Unlike at other shelters, he said his group was accredited by the city to be a part of the welcoming group, allowing them enter the college to help intake the newcomers.
Ginsberg-Jaeckle said he is grateful the administration is making moves to incorporate mutual aid as part of their plan even if progress is slow.
Chicago Tribune’s Dan Petrella contributed.
