Baby, it’s getting cold outside. The calendar may say it’s still fall in Chicago, but really, winter is already here.
The massive number of migrants bused to our city, mostly from south of the United States border, may be getting that message. They come for a better life, but they are learning that these days, Chicago is no place to be. The city’s low temperatures are expected to drop into the upper 20s this week. Our first snowfall of the season arrived three weeks ago. And it will get a lot colder, snowier and icier in the weeks and months to come.
Since August 2022, more than 20,000 migrants have been sent to Chicago from Texas and other southern border states. As of Wednesday, there are 12,000 men, women and children housed in shelters here, with another 2,200 migrants living in police stations across the city and at O’Hare International Airport, waiting for a bed to open, according to city data.
Michael Castejon and his family arrived in Chicago in June after a long and arduous trek from Venezuela. Five months later, they are returning home, the Tribune reported in an article that profiled his harrowing tale.
“The American Dream doesn’t exist anymore,” Castejon told the Tribune before he left Chicago in early November. “There’s nothing here for us.”
In fact, more than 2,000 people have gotten monetary aid from the state of Illinois through Catholic Charities to relocate to other states. Surviving in our “welcoming” sanctuary city is too daunting for some.
“Not only is there no more space in shelters, (migrants) also acknowledge that some residents in Chicago oppose the opening of more shelters for them,” the Tribune reported. “Castejon said that despite the dangerous trek to get here — often begging for money and sleeping in the streets to cross several borders — the journey had not been worth it.”
Castejon and his family slept on the floor of a police station for two weeks, then at a crowed shelter and, for a brief time, shared a house, then they moved to an apartment. In the end, Castejon could not find a decent job to pay the rent. The family ended up back on a police station floor, and that was enough for him.
Venezuelan migrants Michael Castejon, 39, and wife Induliz Sevilla, 30, wait for an Uber ride inside the District 1 police station in Chicago on Nov. 3, 2023, to O’Hare International Airport and the final destination of Texas. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
The recent colder weather “influenced the family’s decision to contact staff at Catholic Charities, pressing for plane tickets that would put them closer to a border town to find a way back home,” the Tribune reported.
Last week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker pumped up the volume by announcing the state would put $160 million into migrant care. That brings total state spending to $478 million for support of the migrants.
Some of the money will pay for tent shelters to house migrants exiled at police stations and O’Hare International Airport.
On Halloween, it snowed in Chicago. “The Hawk,” as Chicago’s wind is known, is on its way, bringing with it life-threatening temperatures.
“Everything we can do, we must do,” Pritzker declared at a news conference.
Time is running out.
“We’re stepping in here to try to help and accelerate this process,” Pritzker said. “It isn’t moving fast enough. That’s why you are still seeing people on the street. We just can’t have people on the street. We cannot have people freezing on the streets of Chicago as we head into very cold weather.”
I am a lifelong, born-and-raised Chicagoan. I love my hometown, but I despise its six-month-plus winters. The cockles of my heart are already shuddering at the thought of January, February and beyond.
Cold weather arrives in Chicago as Venezuelan migrants Leonardo Covieles, wife Marielis Rivas and their son, Lerondro, 1, take shelter inside their tent pitched outside the 1st District police station Oct. 31, 2023. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)
Since the migrants began arriving last year, I have been grappling with the idea that things are so desperate in places such as Venezuela that these families, even with young children in tow, make long trips in harsh and dangerous conditions to get to our border. Then they must endure being shipped like cattle to Chicago, often with nothing but the threads on their backs.
Yet my intimate acquaintance with Chicago winters makes me understand why our new arrivals now are ready to run screaming from here. In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, temperatures range from the mid-40s to low 90s, depending on elevation, according to Britannica.com.
I have a friend who volunteers for an outreach program for migrants in Chicago. Explaining our winters to them is a near-impossible task, he tells me. They cannot fathom a city where temperatures can plunge below zero and 10 inches of snow is not unusual. Tell them, and you get blank looks and incomprehension. They just can’t take it in.
Many of them may help ease the pressure on resources in this crisis by heading for the exits.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
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