Chicago has spent over $100M to care for the illegals arriving in the city thanks to Joe Biden’s broken border.
And yet, despite pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into the crisis, Chicago residents remain concerned about what is happening in a city so overwhelmed migrants are being housed in police stations.
Tensions spilled over at recent community forum on Chicago’s South Side focused on a soon-to-be-reestablished migrant shelter at The Lake Shore Hotel in the Hyde Park area of the city.
The hotel previously served as a shelter for illegals from January to April this year, but the mushrooming crisis has city leaders looking to reopen the facility. Community members are concerned about the noise, cleanliness and drug use that they say was prevalent when it served as a shelter.
At the contentious meeting, one resident proclaimed, “I don’t want them there. Take them someplace else or send them back to Venezuela. I don’t care where they go.”
According to The Chicago Tribune, around 200 people were on hand to press city officials “about everything from whether new arrivals would be vaccinated and fingerprinted to how their children would be educated to the food they would eat to whether migrants were being housed in other parts of Chicago.”
The explanations received mixed reception from residents, who accused city representatives of being insensitive to the concerns about migrants who will be staying in the area. They said they were fearful that they would see an uptick in criminal activity, traffic and parking issues, and problems with the upkeep of the areas where migrants stay.
Adrienne Edwards, 48, said she and her neighbors had witnessed recent arrivals involved in illegal activity and she asked whom they should hold accountable for what they were seeing.
“There’s been a lot of experience with disturbances in our communities,” she said. “(Our) current experience is totally different from the bullet points you’ve given us.”
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Much of the dissatisfaction hinged on the level of services the city was providing to current residents, particularly in predominantly Black areas of the city.