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CHICAGO — State and city officials in Chicago are scrambling to adapt their plans for sheltering asylum seekers as Texas’s governor disregards pleas to suspend migrant transports as dangerously low winter temperatures bring new urgency to the city’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.
Chicago continues to receive new arrivals sent north by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) even as the area experiences its coldest temperatures in half a decade, with wind chills bottoming out at minus-32 degrees on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service.
More than 15,400 asylum seekers flown or bused from Texas are in Chicago shelters in some capacity, according to city data; nearly 250 are sheltering at O’Hare International Airport. As of Sunday, the city had relocated all the people, about 140, who were waiting in the “landing zone,” the area designated for the migrants’ bus arrivals. In recent days, accommodations at the landing zone were largely limited to city buses used as warming centers.
The onset of brutal temperatures prompted Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) to announce Friday that the city would delay a policy, scheduled to take effect Wednesday, that would evict migrants who arrived in 2022 from city-run shelters after 60 days.
Johnson said that the city will “continue to live up to our values as we welcome new arrivals,” but that it needed support from the federal government and cooperation from Abbott.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other Illinois Democrats are sparring with Abbott over the Republican governor’s stated goal of sending migrants to large, blue cities to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies, rebuked Abbott as “uncaring” and intentionally putting vulnerable migrants in harm’s way.
“Here in Illinois, it’s minus-29 degrees outside with the wind chill. We have migrants that arrive from Texas, virtually every day, hundreds, and we don’t have places to put them,” Pritzker said during a Sunday appearance on ABC’s “This Week” in which he also called on both Biden and Congress to help. “And when we’ve asked him to stop sending people because of the weather, because of the dangerous nature of this winter storm that we’re experiencing now, he’s refused to stop sending them. So he does not care about people. He doesn’t care about the migrants.”
He and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said Congress should do more to regulate immigration.
“The system is broken, and we need the help,” Walz said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Abbott, who faced criticism for suggesting Texas law enforcement would shoot migrants crossing the border if they wouldn’t face murder charges, said Friday that he would continue to send migrants to cities like Chicago and New York.
His office announced that it had sent more than 100,000 migrants to “sanctuary cities,” places that have ordinances that generally prohibit local authorities with assisting in federal immigration enforcement.
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Abbott’s defiant message came shortly after Pritzker, a billionaire heir of the Hyatt hotel empire, independently took out a full-page ad in the Austin American-Statesmen imploring Abbott to act compassionately and suspend the migrant transfers during winter storms in the Midwest.
“Chicago’s temperatures this weekend are forecast to drop below zero,” Pritzker wrote. “Your callousness, sending buses and planes full of migrants in this weather, is now life-threatening to every one of the arrivals. Hundreds of children’s and families’ health and survival are at risk due to your actions.”
Abbott has accused Democratic mayors such as Johnson and New York’s Eric Adams of hypocrisy for implementing local orders that restrict charter bus operators from bringing migrants to the city. The mayors have said Abbott is manufacturing a humanitarian crisis, and they accused him of using people as “pawns” in his fight with the Biden administration.
New York said in a lawsuit this month that bus companies were operating in bad faith by transporting people seeking public assistance and by aiding Texas’s plan to shift those costs. City attorneys said the transports violate an obscure 19th century social services law in the Empire State.
The Texas Division of Emergency Management chartered the buses and flights that dropped off migrants in areas around Chicago and New York before boarding them onto regional trains into the cities to flout regulations for bus drop-offs.
At least 203 buses and one flight of migrants have arrived in the Chicago area since Dec. 1, according to data the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications shared with The Washington Post on Sunday. That figure does not include buses and flights that arrived in suburban areas first. The office confirmed an additional 4,468 migrants in its migrant census count from previously reported figures, bringing the city’s total number of arrivals since 2022 to just under 35,000 people.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/01/14/migrants-chicago-weather/