By Eric Cox and Ted Hesson
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Chicago’s new mayor is grappling with how to house hundreds of migrants arriving on buses from the U.S.-Mexico border, with some sleeping in police stations and shelters strained after border crossings rose earlier this month.
Officials in the third-largest U.S. city have said they cannot afford to rent hotel rooms for all arriving migrants and have pressed for more federal funding. Some migrants seeking a safe place to sleep have turned to police stations.
“We’re waiting to see where they’re going to place us,” said Tomas Orozco, a 55-year-old migrant who arrived at a Chicago shelter on Wednesday with his family after an arduous seven-week journey from his home country, Venezuela.
The trip took them through the Darien Gap, an inhospitable jungle separating Colombia and Panama, and his family members were still sick from drinking contaminated water, Orozco said.
The scramble for housing in Chicago and other cities follows the end last week of COVID-19 border restrictions known as Title 42, which allowed U.S. authorities to expel migrants to Mexico without the chance to seek U.S. asylum. Tens of thousands of people hurried to cross the border illegally before U.S. President Joe Biden implemented a strict new asylum regulation to replace Title 42.
Earlier this month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, resumed a campaign of busing migrants to Democratic strongholds further north, including Chicago and New York City.
The busing aims to alleviate pressure on border cities and call attention to what Abbott says were overly lenient policies by Biden’s Democratic administration.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has called on the Biden administration to provide more funding to cities receiving recently arrived migrants.
Adams suspended some of the city’s right-to-shelter rules last week, citing the strain of housing asylum seekers, and is considering using school gyms as shelters.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat who took office on Monday, reaffirmed the city’s commitment to welcoming asylum seekers in his inauguration speech, saying “there’s enough room for everyone.”
Johnson’s Democratic predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, declared a state of emergency earlier this month, calling migrant arrivals a “humanitarian crisis” and pressing for more federal assistance.
Dean Wynne, who owns a Chicago building serving as a temporary shelter for nearly 200 migrants, said families were “subdued and quiet” on the first day they arrived.
“By the second day, I could see little kids were playing around, playing catch, kicking the ball and stuff,” Wynne said. “They were just happy.”
(Reporting by Eric Cox in Chicago and Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Mica Rosenberg and Bill Berkrot)
