Mayor Johnson enters New Year with city at a crossroads on migrants

Alice Yin, Tribune News Service

On Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first full day in office, he visited ground zero of the crisis that would come to define his next seven months. Striding into the 12th District Chicago police station on the Near West Side in May, the new chief executive clasped his hands before his waist as he surveyed a lobby floor cluttered with sleeping bags and families of bleary-eyed migrants. “How do you like Chicago so far?” Johnson asked a woman and boy, with political ally and local Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, translating in Spanish.

As an aide implored TV news crews to step back, the mayor continued: “As a city, we’re going to do everything we can to make this place, your opportunities, more comfortable.”

Now heading into a new year, many Chicagoans are judging the mayor’s performance so far based on how they think he has handled that early promise of clearing out the police stations and humanely resettling asylum-seekers, many of whom arrive impoverished from Venezuela. The singular issue has threatened to eclipse Johnson’s broader agenda, though he points to recent City Council wins on labor requirements and more as evidence he’s living up to his leftist bona fides. Johnson is the most progressive mayor now leading a major American city, and his victory was seen as an electoral mandate for his prescription of bold investments for the working class while leading with compassion. But the desperation of the migrant crisis that awaited him in May rose to unfathomable heights this fall, testing the limits of the mayor’s mantra that Chicago has “enough” for everyone as thousands of migrants slept on police station floors, at the city’s airports and on sidewalks. Indeed, just last week Johnson’s team moved to free up $95 million in COVID-19 stimulus funds to cover the ongoing costs of housing and helping feed asylum-seekers. And the mayor has acknowledged the $150 million allocated in the city budget for next year’s migrant services will surely fall short without help from the state and federal governments.

In an interview, mayoral senior adviser Jason Lee acknowledged the challenges but said the administration has proved it can balance those dynamics while advancing “one of the more progressive agendas in recent municipal history.” Lee highlighted Johnson’s oft-stated goal to run the city in a collaborative way that doesn’t push some groups ahead while leaving others behind.

“The mayor has a vision for transforming the city and doing it in an inclusive way where someone winning doesn’t mean someone else losing, and that remains the goal,” Lee said. “I think we’ve been able to strike the right balance of some real impactful policy that doesn’t polarise.”

But Chicago is a notoriously divided city, with a long history of ethnic groups asserting their own power at the expense of the clout wielded by others. And all the way from Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott fanned the flames further when he sent the first bus of asylum-seekers to Chicago in August 2022 as a rebuke of liberal cities that support open borders. Since then, more than 26,400 migrants have come to Chicago, with some critics upset the city hasn’t done more to accommodate them and others angry at what they say is a policy that puts the new arrivals ahead of the need to address decades of disinvestment in struggling neighbourhoods. Aldermen and other political leaders who spoke with the Chicago Tribune largely split along ideological lines over how they would assess the new administration.

Johnson’s strongest allies said he is being judged unfairly due to the chasm between the political establishment and the grassroots and labour coalition where Johnson rose up as a Chicago Teachers Union organiser. Others warned that Johnson isn’t prepared to handle the decisions Chicago’s mayor faces, and said the past seven months are a harbinger of more struggles. Johnson has weathered criticism he lacks a robust plan on how to grapple with the logistics and exorbitant costs of the migrants, and that his administration has not been transparent, as promised. And he has been publicly second-guessed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other officials, further underscoring perceived problems with the city’s approach. But Lee said beliefs that the city has not formed a robust migrant response plan are based on “misconceptions” of “what is a plan” when it comes to a dynamic situation like Chicago’s. The administration has highlighted that the city’s shelter system swelled under Johnson to 27 citywide sites and that he “inherited” costly contracts from predecessor Lori Lightfoot but has since negotiated rates down. By mid-December, Johnson’s team also heralded that migrants weren’t sleeping at police stations anymore.

That feat came on the heels of the city’s botched proposal to house about 2,000 migrants at a tent encampment in Brighton Park, which rankled local Alderman Julia Ramirez, 12th Ward, and others who complained the city was not communicating with them and that the former industrial land could be contaminated. Those concerns came to a head when Johnson’s team announced the site was safe for temporary living, only for Pritzker to counter days later that his administration found the city contractor’s environmental assessment was heavily flawed and possibly missed harmful amounts of contaminants. In a striking rebuke, Pritzker refused to use state money to pay for the encampment, effectively shelving the idea.