A divided City Council agreed Wednesday to slap a $51 million Band-Aid on Chicago’s burgeoning migrant crisis after a cathartic and racially-charged debate that reduced one member to tears.
The 34-to-13 vote will provide enough funding to carry Chicago only through June 30.
After that, even tougher choices will have to be made.
The raucous and tension-filled meeting saw public speakers on both sides of the migrant crisis shouting each other down, prompting appeals for decorum from Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), whose ward includes the respite center at shuttered Wadsworth Elementary School, was crying as she shouted from her seat about the racial tensions triggered by the emergency request to earmark $51 million for the migrant crisis while the needs of African-Americans continue to be ignored.
“I’m so tired. When it’s a crisis for everybody else, we have to do something. But when it’s the crisis of violence in the Black community, nothing gets done,” Taylor said.
“It ain’t our responsibility to take care of everybody else. When we fought for civil rights — when we fought just to drink out of a damn fountain, it was just us.”
Noting that African Americans came to this country on slave ships, Taylor said, “This wasn’t my choice. I would never choose to live in a space that hurt me every day. ... I know it’s right to help other people. But when the hell are you gonna help us?”
When Taylor finished speaking, her colleagues gave her a standing ovation.
Ald. David Moore (17th) told colleagues “the soul of Chicago is somewhat on trial today,” invoking the theme of Johnson’s inaugural address.
“Fifteen percent of my residents are Latinos. It hurts my heart as I hear people trying to make this a Black and Brown issue. Some of my Latino resident are saying the same things. … I hear them all saying, ‘What about us?’ “ Moore said.
“I get calls from seniors who have paid their taxes for 60 or 70 years. Their porches are falling down. Their roofs are collapsing. Yet they have to go through a lottery to stay in their homes. Some of ’em end up homeless. They go to a fieldhouse that’s 100 years old. It’s falling apart. They say, ‘Y’all get us no money for that.’ “
After visiting a local police station and seeing Hispanic babies, some of whom “look just like me,” Moore said, his “heart hurts for both” Blacks and Hispanics.
“Loving my residents doesn’t mean I hate anyone else,” Moore said, quoting former Mayor Harold Washington.
“I hear people saying, ‘There’s enough money to go around.’ Well, if there’s enough to go around, let’s pass an ordinance where we see the enough. … We have to help the residents of this great city.”
Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) represents a Far North Side ward where a Park District beachhouse is now housing migrants.
Hadden said she supports the fund transfer as “right thing to do” but added that the Council now must “find the money for other projects moving forward,” including reparations for the descendants of slaves.
Newly-elected Ald. Jesse Fuentes (26th) couldn’t agree more.
Fuentes said the raw emotion on display Wednesday was a product of “historical generational trauma” and “pain.”
With police stations “busting at the seams,” Fuentes said Council members have an “obligation to be pragmatic” by approving the fund transfer.
But going forward, Fuentes said they have a “moral obligation” to raise the real estate transfer tax on high-end home sales to create a dedicated funding sources to combat homelessness and “create schools” that are fully-funded and resourced and not “pipelines to prison for Black students.”
Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), chair of the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said he can only hope state and federal lawmakers who have shortchanged Chicago on migrant funding were listening to Wednesday’s debate.
Vasquez acknowledged communities like South Shore, where residents filed suit to stop their shuttered high school from being turned into a respite center, “feel like they’re being invaded because they’ve never gotten anything to begin with.”
Last week, three members used a parliamentary maneuver to postpone the final vote.
Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), Johnson’s floor leader, predicted then that he would easily have the votes to approve the fund transfer when the Council reconvened this week.
He was right.
But the week-long wait did not change the minds of alderpersons Anthony Beale (9th), Ray Lopez (15th) and Anthony Napolitano (41st), the three members who forced the original delay.
They were joined by Northwest Side Ald. Nick Sposato (38th), whose ward is home to Wilbur Wright College, where 400 migrants were transferred to reduce the number of asylum seekers forced to sleep on the floors of local police stations.
Prior to the final vote, Lopez asked three questions: “Where the hell did the $112 million” go that the city as already spent on the migrant crisis? Where will this $51 million go? “only And what is the plan starting July 1, after the latest funds run out?
Napolitano said a city that can’t take care of its own is not worthy of being called a city, noting: “We’re not even taking care of our own sick and our own poor.”
Sposato said his community was “ambushed” by the respite center at Wright. If the $51 million had been earmarked for all of Chicago’s homeless people, instead of being used only to provide temporary housing for migrants, Sposato said he would be all for it. But it’s not.
Chicago is literally out of money, space and time to handle the humanitarian crisis caused by the influx of refugees from Central and South America.
Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared the migrant crisis a state of emergency before leaving office and proposed a $51 million fund transfer that will only be enough to carry Chicago only through June 30. After that, difficult decisions will have to be made.
That is particularly true now that Johnson’s request for more state funding has fallen short.
The $50.6 billion state budget awaiting Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s signature includes just $42.5 million for the migrant crisis — for the entire state, not just for Chicago.
The migrant crisis has not only stretched city resources to the limit, but also exacerbated longstanding political tensions between Blacks and Hispanics.
Those bitter divisions were on display from the moment that Mayor Brandon Johnson gaveled the Council into session.
Protesters in the gallery shouted their opposition to the $51 million fund transfer from the moment the meeting started. They were shouting during the Pledge of Allegiance and continued shouting during the invocation.
One man was so unruly, he had to be escorted out of the Council chambers.
Johnson tried his best to ease the tensions.
“I understand there is a great deal of energy,” the new mayor said, but he urged public speakers to restrain themselves and exercise “some level of decorum” and have a public discourse that “does not demonstrate the worst parts” of our democracy.
That appeal was largely ignored.
Speaker after speaker demanded that the $51 million be spent on reparations to compensate descendants of African American slaves. They demanded that empty schools still standing vacant in South and West Side communities — 10 years after being closed by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel — be turned into community centers to occupy Black youth whose neighborhoods have been starved of resources.
“We haven’t opened up a school to our homeless. We see them every day. We need to take care of our community. We need to take care of the Black community,” one woman said.
“We have not gotten anything for our community. We are sick and tired of it.”