Chicago. We need to talk.
Asylum seekers are showing us things about ourselves.
There is quite a lot to say about the current crisis our “sanctuary city” is in. It’s local, yes, and small compared to global crises currently raging, but it’s not small to the asylum seekers, nor to the folks who feel their neighborhoods are ill-equipped to handle a tidal wave of newcomers. We’re going to spend the next few days trying to sort out all the threads, and see if we can’t come to a better understanding of what our “sanctuary” status means—and for the love of God, a better response to the vulnerable folks being sent here by pretty much no will of their own. Today, part 1.
We Are Not Covering Ourselves In Glory
Chicago is overwhelmed with thousands of asylum seekers being bused up from Texas by sadists who are using human beings as pawns in their game of “gotcha” to see if they can destabilize “Democrat” cities. Hundreds of asylum seekers (a legal status, by the way; these people are not “illegals”) arrive on yellow school buses every day, around the clock, with little to no notice.
Texas leaders want to show so-called “sanctuary cities” how hard and horrible it is to be overwhelmed with non-citizens, and how we can’t handle it and we’re weak hypocritical libs. For Texas, it’s performance art for the federal government, as well as a source of entertainment.
Of course Texas gets billions more in federal aid than Illinois does, much of it earmarked specifically to deal with this challenge. Oh, we get a little federal money too—don’t get me wrong. For this crisis our city council did approve the use of $33M in funds from the Department of Homeland Security, $13M of which has been earmarked for shelters, which anemic amount could go some distance to explain our mayor’s penchant for tents.
Few neighborhoods will even consent to hosting a shelter or one of those pathetically inadequate tents. Meetings and public forums are—how to put this—heated. With current shelters full, and new ones loudly opposed by concerned citizens everywhere, new arrivals are taken to police stations, camping inside and out, mostly out, by the hundreds. In the recent snow the best the city could do was send “warming buses” to 16 out of 22 police stations. Children are getting sick.
From the tent plan, to the shouting matches, to our leaving folks out in the actual literal cold, we are not covering ourselves in glory here in Chicago.
Want some examples? These are all so demoralizing I’m not even linking any references. You can find these stories and many more using the google yourself.
In my own neighborhood, a public forum about the use of the Lake Shore Hotel as a shelter (for the second time—no one noticed the first time) rapidly devolved into a screaming match. Shouts of “Where’s MY money?” and “Send them BACK!” drowned out the speakers.
On the west side, angry concerned citizens threatened to chain themselves to the door of a proposed shelter site, should any migrants perchance approach to enter.
On the north side, angry concerned citizens have filed a lawsuit against the city for ignoring zoning and permitting rules as well as personal property devaluation as it threatens a shelter in the neighborhood; on the south side, angry concerned citizens have filed a lawsuit against the city because housing asylum seekers in police stations is a nuisance.
It’s a little scary to be an alderman right now, because if you’re not screaming (I mean, literally screaming) NOT IN MY BACKYARD, BITCHES, you may find yourself assaulted, or at least losing your next election. In last week’s city council meeting, opposing factions tried to push, or prevent, a referendum on ending our status as a “sanctuary city”; the meeting, which did not have a quorum and for which the mayor was absent, got out of hand, included possible manhandling, and concluded with Ald. Ray Lopez (fresh off his campaign to regulate Little Free Libraries) using his hand for a gavel in the dark, shouting. A council meeting this week was forced into recess on account of the boos and hollering of the citizenry.
One neighborhood held a “Stop the Buses” rally against migrants who are not even being threatened to be placed there—sponsored by an immigration restriction group with ties to white nationalists. No doubt Greg Abbott will be duly persuaded to end his assault on our sanctuary city.
This brings us to something important. I don’t think many folks know what this means—this status of “sanctuary city.” Just that, these days, to most Chicagoans, it’s annoying as hell, messing things up, inconvenient, costly, embarrassing, and currently looking like an epic fail.
What Does It Even Mean That Chicago Is A Sanctuary City?
Before we start I want to state a basic reality. If you take nothing else from this piece, take this: Our status as a sanctuary city has no bearing whatever on the asylum seekers now overwhelming our resources. Our city welcomes and protects undocumented immigrants; asylum seekers are documented and legal. Texas is sending thousands of asylum seekers to us for political theater. And that aforementioned sadism.
With that in mind: Why do we have this status? What is it?
Time for a little history lesson.1 If you know all this, bravo, friend! Skip this part and wait for tomorrow’s post about what you can do to help this mess.
In the early 80s, in response to a massive influx of refugees fleeing political violence in Guatemala and El Salvador, activists demanded the US allow those fleeing to seek asylum. This was denied because the US supported, nay, had installed, those regimes. The Chicago Religious Task Force for Central America sprang up, advocating for changes in foreign policy and immigration policy. It created a network of churches and synagogues who were willing to provide undocumented people fleeing those countries sanctuary. You know, like inside their sanctuaries.
Within ten years, 20 religious institutions were part of this network, Christian and Jewish both. This informal alliance had become strong enough, and culturally influential enough, that Mayor Harold Washington
“codified this [existing] social support into law with Executive Order 85-1, written to ‘assure that all residents of the City of Chicago, regardless of nationality or citizenship, shall have fair and equal access to municipal benefits, opportunities and service.’ This has formed the basis for Chicago’s legal protection of undocumented immigrants ever since.”
What was the upshot? This executive order “end[ed] the city's practice of asking job and license applicants about their U.S. citizenship and halting cooperation by city agencies with federal immigration authorities.” So: no matter who you were or where you came from, in Chicago, if you wanted to work, you could. And in Chicago, your citizenship status wouldn’t be ratted out to the feds.
Now some folks know that our sanctuary status had its origin with Mayor Washington. But you don’t hear very much that it has been endorsed, reaffirmed, repeated, and expanded by every mayor since.
On his second day in office, Mayor Daley reaffirmed fair and equal access to employment, benefits, and licenses to all, regardless of nationality or citizenship status, with an executive order. Daley added the provision that anyone involved in a crime would lose their protected status and get their information handed over to the federal government.
Under Mayor Emanuel, City Council passed the Welcoming City Ordinance, which built on Chicago’s legacy of immigrant protections by preventing
local police from detaining people solely on the belief that they are in the U.S. illegally, and cooperating with federal agents when they suspect status is the only reason the warrant has been issued.
With its introduction in July 2012, Mayor Emanuel said the ordinance would "make Chicago the most immigrant-friendly city in the country."
Rahm put into the Welcoming City Ordinance Daley’s caveat for undocumented residents who committed crimes.
The Ordinance became extremely important in the Trump years when anti-immigrant rhetoric ramped up to dizzying new heights. Trump’s DOJ threatened to cut off federal funding to Chicago because of these protections. Rahm repeatedly sued the DOJ and three times federal judges ruled in favor of Chicago.
Mayor Lightfoot continued and expanded on the now 35-year-long tradition of Chicago’s affirmation and welcoming of immigrants. Amidst the Trump administration’s ongoing threats, when Border Patrol units were deployed to Chicago to round up undocumented residents, Lightfoot assured residents that they never had to open a door to anyone without a warrant.
Finally, Mayor Johnson campaigned on continuing this Chicago legacy, and now finds himself in the first major citywide challenge of our sanctuary status—because of a crisis that is connected to it only incidentally.
The sanctuary movement started in Chicago churches and synagogues. Its moral and political will expanded to influence city policy and was reinforced by a string of five mayors and decades of city council decisions. Federal judges have reaffirmed our status repeatedly. There is hardly anything more Chicagoey about Chicago than our status as the federal-nose-thumbing, newcomer-welcoming, wildly diverse city that works. Maybe it even goes back to 1850 when Mayor James Curtis issued an executive order forbidding police cooperation with the Fugitive Slave Act.
These last four decades of unified, decisive policy regarding undocumented immigrants situated us well for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and threats. But they couldn’t prepare us for the Texas sadists.
It’s been too much, too fast, for any city to deal with. And whereas Mayor Johnson is not demonstrating needed leadership on this issue, things got off on the wrong foot with Mayor Lightfoot. Placing a shelter in a Woodlawn closed school may have seemed logical at the time, but the choice could hardly have been worse. The 50 closed schools each represented the beating heart of a community—a heart that was surgically removed 10 years ago. Those school buildings have never been dealt with in the sunny cheerful life giving manner that was promised. And to announce and implement a migrant shelter in a community that was already on life support, and had been disinvested for decades prior to the school closings, with no community input? It would have been hard to create a worse, more destabilizing, pain-inducing, anger-producing plan.
The ripples have not stopped emanating from this. We’ll come back to this problem of the ripples: to stick with the water metaphor, here in Chicago, we’re submerged in it, and even now it shapes our response to the asylum seekers.
The folks who are cranky about this migrant crisis aren’t wrong: Yes, it costs too much to take care of asylum seekers. It’s inconvenient. It’s challenging to come up with the resources. But did we need to have this response—the one the city seems to be offering, publicly, for national consumption? The one where the mayor’s best idea is tents built and staffed by sketchy contractors? The one where folks are assaulting their aldermen, refusing to let city officials speak at any public meeting about the issue, unable to get through a city council meeting, and actually parroting Donald Trump, who undermined asylum, limited refugees, and implemented a whole host of hateful policies?
Chicago. We have got to get a grip. Remember who we are. Remember that we are capable of great things, and of working together, for good. We can do this.
Actually, we are doing this.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about it.
This account is drawn primarily from two articles: this piece by Megha Kemka for the Chicago History Museum (with lots of links for further study), and this timeline from the Tribune this past spring.