Sanctuary City.

By Mary Williams Walsh.

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The following report was written by Mary Williams Walsh, managing editor of News Items. In eight months, Chicago will host the 2024 Democratic National Convention. To borrow a phrase from the 1968 Democratic National Convention (in Chicago), “the whole world will be watching”. This is what Chicago looks like now.

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In October we wrote about Chicago’s difficulties caring for tens of thousands of migrants, many of whom had traveled gratis on buses provided by the State of Texas. Since then, border crossings have reached record levels, fueling more turmoil in Chicago and prompting high-level reassessments of immigration policy in Washington, just eight months before Chicago has to put on a sunny blue smile and host the Democratic National Convention on its lakefront. Here’s an update.

On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson and 64 fellow Republicans traveled to Eagle Pass, Texas, to visit migrant-processing centers and learn about the record-breaking wave of illegal border crossings—more than 225,000 in the first few weeks of December. 

“One thing is absolutely clear,” the Speaker said. “America is at a breaking point.” Until the border is secured, he said, cartels would flourish, migrants would be at risk, and America would be vulnerable to terrorist infiltration. He laid the blame on the Biden Administration for not doing enough.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is also critical of what he calls “Biden’s open-border policies.” Since April 2022, he’s been offering migrants free bus or plane rides to U.S. cities, like Chicago, that have designated themselves “sanctuary cities”—places where the local police are barred from enforcing the federal immigration laws. In December, Abbott upped the ante, signing a law giving law-enforcement officers in Texas new powers to arrest migrants, and judges new powers to deport them. The law is due to take effect in March.  

House Republicans approve of Gov. Abbott’s tough stance. They want Washington to get tough on illegal immigration, too. That has put the Biden administration in a quandary. The Justice Department just went to court to block Texas’s new law, saying it unconstitutionally impinges on the federal government’s exclusive duty to secure the borders and process arriving noncitizens. Yet President Biden also said in December that he was “willing to make significant compromises on the border.” 

“We need to fix the broken border system,” he said in remarks at the White House. “It is broken.”

Quiet negotiations are now afoot over possible fixes. Currently, immigrants can make claims for asylum once they reach U.S. soil, setting off a complicated process that involves several federal agencies and can go on for years. Republicans want to cut the process short in many cases by making it harder for immigrants to clear an initial hurdle, a screening called a “credible fear interview.” 

Another proposal would tighten up the separate “humanitarian parole” program, which has been used by both parties to admit Hungarians in the 1950s, Vietnamese and Laotians in the 1970s, Iraqi Kurds in the 1990s, Afghans after the 2021 Taliban takeover, and Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. Republicans now say the Biden Administration has been using humanitarian parole far too much, granting entry to hundreds of thousands of people and promoting a mobile app that lets them make appointments for upcoming border crossings.

The right to asylum has been a central part of U.S. immigration law for decades. The Biden administration is willing to consider changing it now, in part, because Republicans have said that’s the price of continued aid to Ukraine and Israel—but also because of the troubles playing out in cities like Chicago. Chicago has strong progressive traditions to begin with, and it has been a sanctuary city since 1985, with mayor after mayor strengthening the law and adding more protection over the years. But the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants has put some residents on the same page as Texas Gov. Abbott.

M3 Strategies, a polling and consulting firm in Chicago, recently found that less than half of Chicagoans—39 percent—still want to be a “sanctuary city.” Support for the policy was strongest among whites, at 49 percent. But just 31 percent of Black Chicagoans, and 38 percent of Latinos, said they wanted to remain a sanctuary city. Many said they saw the new migrants drawing resources away from longstanding residents, who were fed up with pious lip service from elected officials. 

“It is not sustainable, and clearly political, and because of that, we are the ones that suffer,” wrote one man, identified as a middle-aged Latino. “I’m tired of the black and brown designations our elected officials and media give us, and yet when it comes to ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, the legal citizens are the ones who are suffering … especially the black and brown ones, who we constantly hear our elected officials claim to care about the most.”

Gov. Abbott’s free busing program was already in force when Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson took his oath in May 2023. But arrivals accelerated sharply in August, overwhelming Johnson’s new administration. Suitable living space was quickly filled, and some 4,000 migrants ended up sleeping on the floors of police stations, at O’Hare Field, and in tiny pup tents in city parks.

One day in early October Mayor Johnson said he would travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to assess the situation—soon. When asked why not right away, he said somewhat cryptically that he was too busy.

“We still have public safety that we have to address," he said. "We still have the unhoused that we have to address. I still have a budget that I have to address. And I'm doing all of that with a Black wife, raising three Black children on the west side of the city of Chicago. I am going to the border as soon as possible.”

He never went. 

The mayor did set about organizing a “base camp” to house some 2,000 of the migrants in enormous tents, big as high school gyms, heated with gasoline generators, and outfitted with tented dining halls, showers, and unarmed security guards.

To set up such a base camp, you need a very large, flat, empty plot of ground. The mayor’s office found a vacant 11-acre site that the city could lease. Surrounded by the majority-Latino and Chinese neighborhood of Brighton Park, it had once been home to a railroad yard and a zinc smelter, as well as an underground diesel-fuel tank.

Johnson forged ahead, making the stunning political blunder of starting residential construction on a brownfield site without waiting for environmental tests to be done—or notifying the neighbors. Angry crowds formed as earth-moving equipment rumbled in to lay new water and sewer lines. Some neighbors filed lawsuits, saying the city was violating its own zoning rules. Others picketed, carrying signs in English, Spanish and Chinese, banging metal pots and shooting off fireworks. An alderwoman who represented Brighton Park came by to speak with her constituents. She was roughed up and had to be rescued by the police. An aide who tried to protect her landed in the hospital.

The alderwoman, Julia Ramirez, said the protesters had swarmed the wrong person: The site selection was entirely Mayor Johnson’s doing. “I was not asked or given a vote,” she said. She then called a community meeting, so residents of Brighton Park could voice their opinions in a place where the mayor would hear them.

Many attendees brought up security. “There is none,” said Julie Gamez, a 16-year resident of Brighton Park. “I’m out at four in the morning and I don’t see a single patrol car. There have been robberies. There’s been beatings. Shootings. I’m an immigrant, and I know that we need to help them. But there has to be another place for them to go. Let’s fix our problems first.” 

Mayor Johnson was unmoved. His office issued a statement that the base camp site “appears viable,” although environmental testing was still going on. The zoning requirements could be overlooked because the base camp was going to be temporary.

But it didn’t look temporary, what with all the new water and sewer lines. The site was graded, the street lights fixed, the steel frames for the tents erected—and only then did the city reveal that testing had turned up significant amounts of arsenic, mercury, lead, and other toxins. It issued the findings in an 800-page report, late on a Friday evening when few journalists were likely to cover it.  

Even then, the mayor’s office said everything was fine. It had already removed the contaminated soil and covered the ground with a thick layer of gravel, making it “safe for temporary residential use.” 

But the State of Illinois didn’t think it was fine. After committing $65 million to the base camp, it ordered construction to stop until state environmental regulators could take a look. The very next day, the state said the city’s soil sampling and remediation were insufficient and noncompliant with state standards. Gov. J.B. Pritzker pulled the plug on the base camp and said the state would work with the city to find alternative sites for housing several thousand migrants.

Before the governor could say what options might be at hand, Johnson’s office issued a statement defending the base camp, saying the state had been in the loop and should have spoken up sooner if it was worried about contamination.

Mayor Johnson also held a news conference where he claimed to have secured “new investments” from Illinois and Cook County, which includes much of Chicago, “to meet the needs of this humanitarian crisis.” He didn’t give much detail but said the state was going to pay for more personnel to process new arrivals, and get them in and out of the city shelter system in 60 days or less.

In fact, Gov. Pritzker had been planning to unveil $160 million worth of state assistance for the migrants the very next day. He didn’t appreciate being upstaged by Johnson. Normally the governor comes across as a back-slapping, affable pol, but in his news conference he took a rare jab at Johnson, saying the state had been forced to take over Chicago’s migrant crisis because the city hadn’t “moved fast enough.”

Reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times listened and wrote about bad blood between the governor and the mayor, saying it arose out of policy differences but was “also at least tangentially tied to Pritzker’s presidential ambitions and his fears that Johnson’s executive inexperience, painfully slow decision making, and progressive political tilt could be detrimental to Chicago’s long-term financial health, and somehow undermine the governor’s political future.”  

Pritzker pooh-poohed the analysis, saying that he and Johnson “have a very good relationship with one another,” and the media just liked to blow things out of proportion.

It was Pritzker who had lobbied President Biden to hold the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, promising an inviting, crowd-savvy venue that wouldn’t blow the budget when every nickel had to be conserved for the presidential campaign.

“Chicago is your kind of town,” Mr. Pritzker said when Biden called to tell him that Chicago had beat out New York and Atlanta, according to The New York Times. “We’re going to throw a huge party for you.”

But there’s much to be done before the Convention, and it’s not clear the mayor is up to it. The Chicago police force is still below its pre-pandemic headcount. Crime is a persistent worry. Activist groups are filing applications to demonstrate outside the convention venue. Just last week [Jan. 5] a new group of Brighton Park residents appeared, demanding the city come back and get rid of the arsenic, mercury, lead and other contaminants it had unearthed in their neighborhood. 

“They did not clean up,” said the group’s leader, Dr. Kim Tee. “They ducked out and opened up a can of worms.”

A recent poll, commissioned by the Illinois Policy Institute, found that Mayor Johnson’s approval rating was just 28 percent. Eight months isn’t much time for him to reunite the city and restore his own credibility for when the Democratic conventioneers and the TV cameras are in town.

The M3 Strategies poll offered a clue for what could be done. When respondents were asked to choose between having Chicago invest in integrating the migrants, or having the feds solve the problem at the border–which could mean letting in fewer migrants–the overwhelming majority called for letting the feds deal with it. The most overwhelming were the Latinos.