The Immigration "Issue"
Comes to Chicago.
The following essay was written by Mary Williams Walsh, a New York Times escapee and the managing editor of News Items. It’s a terrific piece, worth reading in full, about one of the most important issues of the 2024 presidential election. — John Ellis
Last year, when Texas Governor Greg Abbott started sending migrants by bus and by plane to America’s self-designated sanctuary cities, his stated goal was straightforward: He wanted to repudiate President Biden’s “open-border policies.”
He didn’t say he wanted to throw America’s third-largest city into disarray, or to turn Chicago’s residents against Brandon Johnson, the progressive mayor they elected just last April. He certainly didn’t talk about stirring up a hornets’ nest ahead of the Democratic National Convention, set for next summer on Chicago’s lakefront.
But that’s what Abbott has done, and the turmoil in Chicago may have figured in President Joe Biden thinking yesterday, when he confirmed that he was going ahead with construction of about 20 more miles of Trump’s unfinished border wall, saying the current wave of migration over the US-Mexico border left him no choice. The deportation of Venezuelans in the US illegally will also begin. Work on the wall will use money that Trump set aside but had not yet spent when he left office. Biden suspended construction on the day of his inauguration.
The president said he still doesn’t believe border walls are effective, but Congress wouldn’t repurpose the money, and federal law required it to be spent as appropriated by the end of 2023.
It’s been a rough few weeks in Chicago. Mayor Johnson, a former organizer for the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, was elected last April after a campaign of lofty promises: racial justice, fair housing for all, “community-centered strategies to combat poverty,” and more. Johnson didn’t offer a whole lot of detail on how much his goals would cost, or where the city would get the money, but that didn’t seem to bother his voters. He had made frequent references to “A Tale of Two Cities,” and that image resonated with people. They saw in him the possibility that at long last, the city government would make their needs a priority.
Even then, last spring, busloads of migrants were already arriving in Chicago—but nowhere near as many buses as now. This fall something changed. In mid-September Mayor Johnson said the city had a $538 million budget deficit, six times what his predecessor had forecast. And then it seemed as if the floodgates opened, and the city least able to accommodate the migrants was suddenly getting more than anyone else. Hundreds of migrants were being dropped off daily on street corners, exhausted after long journeys, some with small children in tow, clutching meager possessions in plastic bags and bundles.
The Salvation Army facilities were overflowing. Downtown hotels that had failed during the pandemic were quickly filled. Schools and colleges had no space because classes had resumed. Migrants lined the floors of police stations and a shuttle bus terminal at O’Hare Field. The city’s Emergency Management Office said there was absolutely no more space, and the buses kept coming.
Protests erupted in Daley Plaza—not against the governor of Texas, for sending the migrants, but against Chicago itself, for mishandling the crisis. Some picketers said they saw racism at work: How else could there be no space for Venezuelans, when white Ukrainian refugees had easily found their way into housing? Others were indignant on behalf of Chicago’s thousands of native-born homeless people, who were being ignored. (Mayor Johnson responded by creating a Chief Homelessness Officer position.)
City workers learned that the State of Illinois had an existing contract with a logistics and security company, GardaWorld Federal Services. Chicago could piggyback on that. For $30 million, GardaWorld would set up insulated tent encampments for the migrants, heated, thanks to backup generators. Residents were deeply suspicious. Some complained that GardaWorld’s tents were “military-grade.” Rumors spread that GardaWorld had been spiriting migrants away from Denver, where they were unwanted, and bringing them to Chicago. (The company said it does not transport migrants from state to state.)
Then came the news that GardaWorld’s tents had to be pitched on fairly large tracts of land—two or three acres—that were empty, flat, and topped with concrete or gravel. The places with land fitting that description were concentrated on Chicago’s Far South Side, in majority-Black neighborhoods. The people there, who had hoped they might benefit from Mayor Johnson’s promises of “vibrant neighborhoods” and “community wealth building,” found they were going to be stuck with militaristic tents, noisy generators and portable toilets.
“It’s always the folks who already get the least that are made to say wait again,” said Jeanette Taylor, an alderwoman who served on Mayor Johnson’s transition team, one of many Chicagoans who spoke out in a raucous meeting of the city council’s committee on immigrant and refugee rights.
“Stop putting them in our community,” she said. “You’re going to start a race war. That’s what you’re doing. This is going to be a race war, because y’all choosing who you’re taking care of.”
Taylor is an experienced community activist. She won re-election last spring with the support of the Chicago Teachers Union and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the same as Mayor Johnson. After winning a new term as alderwoman, she threw her support behind Johnson when the mayoral race went into a runoff. Now all that was behind her. She was livid about the failings of the government that she was part of.
“Where is the governor? Where are the congressmen? Where are they?” she demanded. She said she’d heard that white aldermen had been able to block migrant encampments planned for their wards, leaving the whole burden to the majority Black and Latino wards. She asked whether city officials had discussed the migrant crisis with Biden administration officials who had been in town four days earlier, to plan for the Democratic Convention.
“I don’t believe that was a topic of discussion,” said a man from the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
“How?” she gasped. “How, when we’re spending millions of dollars?” She warned there would be protests at the Democratic Convention if the city didn’t start leveling with its residents about what was going on and who was paying for it.
“They’re going to shut it down, and rightfully so,” she said.
The longer the meeting went on, the louder it got. City officials were booed. At one point the police had to restore order. Some people called for putting Chicago’s status as a “sanctuary city” to the voters in a referendum. But not everyone wanted to wait that long.
“Will you force the immigrants to leave?” someone yelled.
As a practical matter, Chicago can’t force the immigrants to leave. Being a “sanctuary city” isn’t just a slogan—it’s the law, and it has been since 1985, when Mayor Harold Washington issued an executive order prohibiting city workers from enforcing the federal immigration laws. He was responding to Reagan administration policies that changed the following year, with a big amnesty, but his executive order stayed in force. Mayor Richard M. Daley reaffirmed it in 1989, and the city council codified it in 2006. It was supplemented in 2012 with new rules for how the police were to treat migrants during background checks. In 2021 the rules for police were tightened even more.
But that’s nothing compared to the $4 billion program Governor Abbott is running in the opposite direction in Texas, Operation Lone Star. It’s meant to provide border security, not sanctuary.
Texas launched Operation Lone Star in March 2021, after President Biden took office and suspended a Trump administration policy of making would-be asylum-seekers wait in Mexico until their court cases could be heard by U.S. immigration judges. While the policy was in force, a large, makeshift migrant encampment formed in the Mexican border city of Matamoros, full of people awaiting their day in court. When Biden lifted the policy, the asylum-seekers went over the border freely. Litigation followed and a federal judge in Texas ordered the Biden administration to reinstate part of the Trump policy. A new encampment formed in Matamoros, next to the old one.
There was never a shortage of work for Operation Loan Star. Run by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department, its stated mission is border security, but its agents often turn up miles away from the border, busting people for cockfighting, stalking, drug trafficking, assault–not just for slipping over the border. Gov. Abbott has empowered Lone Star agents to arrest migrants for trespassing on private land, something that would be intolerable in Chicago.
The US Constitution gives the federal government sole authority to enforce America’s immigration laws. But Abbott justifies his state’s involvement in border security with a declaration that’s normally used to give Texas governors extraordinary powers after natural disasters.
Abbott’s in his third term as governor, after handily surviving a challenge by Beto O’Rourke, a former member of Congress who last year broke all Texas’s previous records for campaign fundraising. Abbott made border security a cornerstone of his campaign. After winning the primary, he started busing migrants North. More than once, he had busloads of migrants dropped outside the official Washington residence of Vice President Kamala Harris, and announcing that the Biden administration “must stop the lie that the border is secure, and instead immediately deploy federal assets to address the dire problems you have caused.”
When asked about all the money being sent on Operation Lone Star, Abbott said, “We shouldn’t have to allocate any money for it. This is all because of Joe Biden’s failure to do the president’s job, to secure the border.”
He said O’Rourke would lead Texas down the same path. His margin of victory was 11 percentage points.
After he won re-election, the buses didn’t stop. Last Christmas Eve, three busloads of migrants were deposited outside Harris’s official residence in below-freezing weather. Some of them were wearing shorts.
Winters in Chicago are much worse. Mayor Johnson complained to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker that the state wasn’t doing enough. On Monday, Governor J.B. Pritzker sent an open letter to President Biden, asking for funding and expedited work authorizations, to give the migrants a crack at finding jobs soon and supporting themselves.
He didn’t name the “border politicians” who “have shipped people to our state like cargo, in a dehumanizing way to score political points.” But he said the result was a humanitarian crisis.
“The federal government must take over the interior coordination of routing buses of newly arrived migrants across the country and oversee communication between states, so they are aware of who is arriving and when,” he wrote. “The federal government must stop abdicating responsibility once [U.S. Customs & Border Protection] releases migrants into the interior of the country. Your administration has the capacity, resources and legal recourse to do this right now.”
That might not have been quite right. Gov. Pritzker’s message landed the day before former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted by hardline Republicans who want indiscriminate reductions in federal spending—not a propitious time to say there were ample resources to help a troubled blue city.
Not long after that, Mayor Johnson announced that he would soon make a trip to the US-Mexico border. So far, he has offered no specifics about what he’ll do there, or who will be hosting him. Johnson also said Homeland Security personnel were arriving in Chicago this week, to make an assessment. And then Biden confirmed that he’d build another 20 miles of Donald Trump’s wall. During his campaign, Biden pledged he wouldn’t build “another foot.”
Maybe now there will be a letup in the flow of buses to Chicago. And maybe that will defuse the tensions and people will pull together again. Maybe.
“We are seeing people in communities that have been plagued by disinvestment, now saying the same thing you would hear at a Trump rally,” said Andre Vasquez, chairman of the embattled Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights. He spoke with journalists after calling a recess in that stormy meeting.
“They are giving up on the Democratic Party. And if the party and the president aren’t doing what’s necessary in this moment, they’re going to end up seeing the results of that in August, which I will remind folks is not that far away from November, when we see a presidential election.”
 | A guest post by
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