Mayor Brandon Johnson on Friday moved ahead together with his plan to shut Chicago’s migrant shelters and fold them into town’s current system for homeless residents.
The so-called One Shelter system will mix shelters which have lengthy served town’s homeless with a number of amenities launched to take care of the greater than 50,000 migrants who’ve arrived in Chicago since August 2022. The change, introduced in September and at last made simply days earlier than Le Christmas holidays mark the top of town’s response to the migrant disaster.
“That interval has virtually come to an finish,” Deputy Mayor for Immigration Beatriz Ponce de León stated at a information convention Friday. “That doesn’t suggest it won’t occur once more, however given the border insurance policies, the restrictions on the border, we simply do not see individuals crossing in giant numbers and subsequently not being despatched to Chicago.”
A 12 months in the past, about 15,000 migrants — many bused in from Texas towards town’s needs — had been residing in 28 Chicago shelters, in line with metropolis information. But that inhabitants has plummeted in current months. As of Friday, there have been 2,476 individuals housed in six migrant shelters, in line with town.
The Department of Family and Support Services’ new mixed system will add 3,800 beds in 5 shelters to the present system’s 3,000 beds. Residents in reception facilities won’t face deadlines on their keep as migrants now do. The shelters can be run by native teams reminiscent of Catholic Charities that received a young, DFSS Deputy Commissioner Maura McCauley stated.
The metropolis closed its migrant “touchdown zone” on Thursday and opened a brand new “shelter and useful resource heart” on Friday supposed to serve adults combating homelessness, McCauley stated. The always-open Pilsen headquarters may have 200 beds and supply clothes and meals to these in want, connecting each migrants and Chicagoans to different shelters, McCauley added.
The new system may also embody a $2 million emergency rental help program, whereas the state will add one other $2 million earmarked to assist transfer “newcomers” out of shelter beds and into communities, he stated McCauley.
However, town won’t hold observe of how most of the system’s residents are migrants, Ponce de León stated. City officers introduced Friday morning that they’d cease amassing such information, which it had shared with the media for months.
“We are not in that state of disaster. We need not make these distinctions. And everybody within the new system will abide by the identical coverage,” he stated. “There isn’t any want to gather such information.”
Johnson has repeatedly stated he won’t cooperate with President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans. Ponce de León stated town is engaged on steering on what shelter employees ought to do if federal brokers arrive to hold out deportation raids and plans to attach residents to authorized help.
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