When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was elected to replace the unpopular Lori Lightfoot, it was a bit like the city was jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Sure, Lightfoot was progressive, but she had nothing on Johnson, whose main issue with the city’s failed liberal policies is that Chicago hadn’t doubled down enough on them.
Well, that hasn’t worked out superbly for Mayor Johnson, who now sports a 28 percent approval rating, according to an October Illinois Policy Institute poll, and is dealing with an illegal immigrant crisis of immense proportions. What’s worse, the city only jumped into the fire metaphorically — meaning that it’s still winter, it’s still cold, and it now needs to find a way to house the migrants who have arrived there.
Residents aren’t going to like Johnson’s solution.
According to The Associated Press, the city moved Monday to extend a 60-day limit on shelter stays for illegal immigrants seeking asylum. The policy will now give between 30 to 60 more days for illegals in 28 city shelters, affecting about 14,000 people.
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According to the AP, the chief reason for the extension was Chicago’s weather.
If the policy hadn’t been implemented, almost 2,000 immigrants faced eviction in a matter of days.
“Our plan for temporary emergency shelter was never meant as a long-term housing solution, but we want to give every person and every single family that has come to our city enough time to process their work authorization, find housing, start a new life in our great city,” Johnson said at a media briefing.
It’s the second enforcement delay that Johnson has implemented due to weather. (Apparently, Chicago Democrats were surprised the Windy City gets cold this time of year.)
Are sanctuary cities bad?
The 60-day limit was imposed in November as the city allocated an additional $150 million in its 2024 budget to care for illegal immigrants who arrive in Chicago. That brought the total amount the city was spending on the migrants to $363 million.
As Chicago station WTTW-TV reported at the time, the mayor offered “direct acknowlegment of the deep racial divisions exposed by the crisis that has defined the mayor’s first six months in office.”
“Chicago, I heard you, and I hear you,” he said.
“This approach that we have right here is to make sure we are addressing the anxiety and fear that people have, whether you are a taxpayer or someone who is seeking asylum in the city of Chicago while speaking to our hopes and aspirations.”
“We will always be a welcoming city and a sanctuary city,” he added.
However, a rally by black residents at the time underlined just how divisive the issue was in a city where crime and quality of life issues are serious concerns for legal taxpayers:
Black Chicago citizens say they demand Democrats to end sanctuary city policies and threatens to vote for republicans or independents pic.twitter.com/frhO5sYh1F
— Dowop Robinson (@dowop_robinson) November 13, 2023
“We’re here to say to black aldermen who are elected by the black citizens of Chicago that we are fed up with you not hearing our stress and our demands but rather do what you want to do to please the Democratic Party,” an unnamed speaker said during the rally, taking black elected officials to task for failing to stop buses of illegal immigrants from Texas from arriving.
“We are fed up with you for not taking the lead to stop the buses,” she said.
“We are fed up with you for not demanding of Brandon Johnson to remove illegal immigrants from our community, and we’re also here to say we are denouncing Alderman William Hall and Lamont Robinson for going to the border to look into the eyes of illegal immigrants but has failed to look into the eyes of homeless black men women and children and other citizens of Chicago.”
Meanwhile, in the neighborhood of Hyde Park — where migrants were put up at a hotel last summer — this was the response from residents:
And, as WLS-TV reported in November, local residents were suing the city over its handling of the illegal immigrant crisis:
Of course, Johnson has no legal authority to stop people who want to come to his city from coming there — a fact that has allowed a border crisis that would ordinarily be contained to places like Texas and Arizona to spread to Democrat-run big cities that now have to figure out how to handle a crisis they’d assumed would stay far away.
And while the residents are criticizing Johnson for being too welcoming, some politicians on the left have criticized Johnson for not being welcoming enough:
“The city’s shelter limits have been criticized, most recently by a group of aldermen who wrote Johnson a letter last week asking him to scrap the limits out of concern over the health and safety of new arrivals, particularly in the winter,” the AP reported.
Perhaps the only good news Johnson has is that his city has spent only $156.2 million on the migrant crisis, according to CBS News. WTTW noted that Johnson had previously projected to Congress it would cost taxpayers $361 million to handle by the end of 2023.
That’s still not a bargain, however, and without a solution in place, airports, city buses, police stations and other unusual locales have been used to supplement shelters — shelters originally meant to support Chicago’s homeless, not another country’s.
But these are the inevitable consequences s of a de facto open borders policy. The crisis that the Biden administration ignored was never going to stay put in Texas.
Instead, cities like New York, Chicago, Denver and, yes, even Washington, D.C., are feeling the brunt of ill-considered political posturing. Sadly, with the government determined not to let states enforce the border or to take concrete steps to stop the deluge of migrants, it’s only going to get worse from here.
You get what you voted for, Chicago.
