The issues arising from thousands of illegal immigrants pouring into Chicago from around the world have united many in the city’s black and Hispanic communities, who blame the government for the resultant social problems, including crime.
Local citizens say that their neighborhoods are less safe, their schools are overcrowded, already scarce jobs are now even harder to come by, and the distribution of municipal resources favors illegal immigrants.
“My beef is with the government, not with the migrants,” said Hector, a Hispanic pastor from Brighton Park on the city’s south side.
“There are a lot of injustices. We do not see equality. The migrants are given everything. The money is coming from our pockets.”
The city has provided housing for the new arrivals, ranging from large tents and warehouses to hotels scattered throughout the city and in some suburbs.
Chaplain Antonio, who ministers to immigrants, has observed criminal gang colors, signs, and emblems among them as he greets the newcomers on their arrival in Chicago.
“We are not against legitimate immigration, but this problem should have been stopped at the border,” he said.
Antonio also said the government is favoring the new noncitizen immigrants over people who are already here.
Voices From the Community
On a recent night, The Epoch Times met up with Tee and X (not their real names), two black men well-acquainted with life on Chicago’s mean streets, for a drive through some of the South Side’s deadliest neighborhoods.X called the area “Cowboy Land,” where anything can happen at any time.
Driving through blocks of dilapidated houses and boarded-up storefronts, the pair pointed to street corner after street corner where someone had been shot to death recently.
X, who survived gang involvement well into his early 30s, said he can name 100 people killed in street violence.
Despite all that, he said, “I love my city. I wouldn’t leave. South Chicago is my land.”
Cautious in word and action, X avoided prison. Today, he lives in a small house in a neat, working-class area and works in construction. He is a single parent raising two sons.
X said he has nothing against the Venezuelans who make up the largest segment of the new arrivals. “They’re just trying to make a living,” he said.
Tee, a middle-aged elder statesman of Chicago’s gang and street life who is no stranger to the prison system, said: “Our life is hell. People are dying over here.”
Tee pointed to a woman he knew on the sidewalk. “You see that homeless woman? She’s been a resident of Hyde Park her entire life. She is a United States citizen. She fell bad on her luck. She’ll be sleeping outside tonight,” he said.
“If she were an illegal Venezuelan, she would show up at the entrance to a luxury hotel downtown or on Lake Michigan and be taken right in. They are given everything.
“When I need rent assistance, I can’t get it. But if I am Venezuelan, no problem.
“We have no problem with them being here. The problem is, they’re living here free.
“This is a sanctuary city. Yet my people live in poverty.”
According to Tee, the rising demand for housing will only get worse.
“The illegals need somewhere to live. They are not going to stay in those shelters forever,” he said.
“Some Venezuelans are squatting in run-down and abandoned residential buildings. They take them over, and nothing happens to them. They are immune from the law.
“If a black man has an old felony conviction, when he goes to apply for a benefit, he’s told, ‘Sorry, you have a prior felony that disqualifies you.’
“Yet thousands of illegals come here with no background check. Who knows what they did back home? Yet, they are signed up right away.”
Like Hector, Tee sees the government, not the Venezuelans, as the problem.
“I believe the illegal migrants are brought in by the government to displace the blacks,” he said.
“They are bringing into already impoverished cities like Chicago poor, military-age men with no women. What could go wrong?
“We’ve got no problem with people coming here the right way. What we don’t like is the government immediately handing them resources that we have to stand in line for.
“I don’t see color. I see right or wrong.”
A registered voter, Tee said he would be voting for former President Donald Trump and was strongly urging his friends to do the same.
“Trump will remove the illegal aliens from our communities,” he said.
Economic Frustration
African American Pastor Dave Lowery’s ministry works out of a string of connected storefronts on the corner of 113th Street and Michigan, a rough and economically depressed section of Chicago where jobs are hard to come by.Lowery, 67, remembers the days when there were many black-owned local businesses, whose owners taught their children to become entrepreneurs.
“We didn’t worry about jobs because we created them ourselves,” he said.
Lowery said that when the younger generation of black politicians and community leaders abandoned that tradition and those values in favor of a culture of dependency, the change fostered an unhealthy and dangerous “hatred of self” among many black residents.
“The politicians tell black women, ‘We can’t give you welfare if your man remains in the house.' That destroyed the black family and destroyed the black economic engine,” he said.
“As capital and resources dwindled, black people turned on each other for pennies. Today, I’d have to shoot somebody to defend a business in Chicago.
“Nowadays, they don’t teach the basics in our schools. Our children have not been taught to become men and women, husbands and wives.
“It’s little wonder that we don’t do the right thing as individuals.”
Lowery is worried that the influx of illegal immigrants into the schools and neighborhoods could affect the black community “in ways they might not come back from.”
He spoke of the resentment black residents feel when, for example, “the city gives migrants free cars from the impound yard.”
Black community activist David Barnes added: “For some time, there has been a migration out by our people as soon as they can afford to do so. This has decimated communities such as Roseland. It is a dying community.
“The city of Chicago has to replace those people so it is relying on immigration.”
Unfair Competition and Favoritism
Morris Anderson is a licensed, bonded, and insured general contractor.Anderson, an African American, said his once thriving business declined by 60 percent after the arrival of the migrants.
“The Venezuelans hang out at the Home Depot waiting to be hired by my competitors to work under the table for a quarter of what I pay my workers,” he said.
“Only a small number of the migrants have work permits, but that doesn’t keep them from working.”
Lowery said that the city held a special event called a “hiring hall” at an area church, but when black laborers showed up, “they were met by security and were told the event was just for the immigrants.”
“That kind of thing provokes the citizens against the illegals,” Anderson said. “It could start a civil war between us and the government over how we are being treated.”
Lowery said that the influx of thousands of foreign, military-age men into Chicago neighborhoods is like “putting a bunch of lions into a small pit and throwing in one piece of meat.
“There’s a big ongoing fight over scarce resources,” he said.
He favors Trump’s plan for mass deportation and called for the elimination of Chicago’s sanctuary city status.
Political Realignment
Devin Jones, 38, opened a Republican campaign office at the corner of South Pulaski and 85th Street on the city’s South Side because he believes the “America first” agenda would better serve the interests and meet the needs of Chicago’s African American community.
Jones, a black Navy veteran who can trace his ancestry in the United States back to 1781, said: “I didn’t know there was anything but America first. I always thought it was our priority.
“It is a strange use of our tax dollars to support illegal immigrants within and foreign countries without, while the generational wealth of my people is being taxed away to pay for it.”
A GOP committeeman and local political activist, Jones said he noticed the infiltration of illegal immigrants into his majority-black neighborhood when he circulated various petitions door-to-door.
“Many people couldn’t sign because they were foreign nationals,” he said.
“Here they are, with no stake in the game, building a life on the shoulders of those of us who struggled for years to acquire and maintain a nice home and business.
“They get to live off of the fruits of our labor without having contributed anything.
“We are American citizens who just want to keep what we have earned.”
Jones, a college graduate born and raised on the South Side, where he still resides, understands the connection between a good education and upward mobility.
The Immigrants’ Story
Strong locks and gruff private security guards make it next to impossible for members of the media to access the interior of the large hotels sheltering hundreds of illegal immigrants.“If what is going on inside those shelters is so wholesome and peaceful, why all the secrecy?” asked Terry Newsome, a native Chicagoan who moved to the suburbs.
Activated by the illegal immigration in his hometown and how the trouble was spilling out into the suburbs, Newsome wants to see the southern border sealed and deportations begun.
When The Epoch Times and Newsome inquired about speaking to a shelter manager and some residents, and possibly taking photos of their living conditions, both were forcefully told to leave the premises. The shelter housing hundreds of illegal immigrants is located in a multistory Holiday Inn near Midway Airport.
Newsome said that when he visited the upscale Chicago Lakeshore Hotel, another large facility used to house scores of illegal immigrants, a female security guard swatted a cellphone from his hands as he took pictures of dozens of migrants eating in the dining room with its unimpeded view of Lake Michigan through large plate glass windows.
The city has announced its intent to cease sheltering migrants at the facility, but has not yet relocated all the residents.
The next stop was the refurbished Inn of Chicago in the famous Magnificent Mile area.
This time, a gathering of about two dozen women, some with young children in strollers, had set up a makeshift outdoor flea market selling food and clothing in an alley across the street from the boutique hotel.
Most of the group were Venezuelan, while several were nationals of Ecuador and Colombia.
The women did not speak English. Though they were reluctant to talk at first, a translator cajoled them to answer questions and share some of their experiences.
The women spoke quickly and over each other, making it difficult to assign names to comments.
One woman said, “Catholic Charities gives us clothing and essentials.”
One said the city was paying for their hotel stay, but the food it served was “not what we are used to.”
“We don’t like it,” another said.
The women said they grill Venezuelan-style food and sell it from coolers to passersby, all the while dodging Chicago public health officers who repeatedly try to shut them down. They peddle their wares to make money without a city license.
There was scarcely a man in sight. “The men leave the hotel in the morning and scatter throughout the city trying to make money any way they can. Many work construction. They return to the hotel at night,” one woman said.
When asked if the men had work permits, she answered: “Some do. The majority do not.”
One younger woman, Paola, was in a wheelchair.
Roughly half the women were pregnant.
One woman said she has three children and one on the way. “Look at me. What am I going to do?” she said.
Another expectant mother, when asked about her husband, said she was raped on her journey to the United States and did not know the name of the father.
One young woman said she was seeking to get married.
“How about you?” she asked, provoking her friends to laugh.
She, like her companions, made much of their months-long trek from Venezuela on foot.
All had passed through the notoriously dangerous Darien Gap, a region of hazardous terrain connecting Colombia to Panama.
Upon illegally crossing the U.S.–Mexico border in Texas, many of the women were processed by Border Patrol and turned over to the care of a nongovernmental organization, said another woman.
The people in her group were given cellphones and told to sign up on an immigration website. They were then assigned a QR code and given debit cards.
One woman said: “We thought we would be arrested. Instead, we were just processed. We were told to appear in court in 2027.”
Dashed Expectations
Several women said they felt disappointed when they got to Chicago, because at the beginning of their journey, they were told by their smugglers that they would have a job and a home waiting for them on arrival.“We want to work. We want to start a Venezuelan restaurant,” some of the women said.
All agreed that they were “unhappy and dissatisfied.”
A woman pointed to two children who were with her and said: “These are not my children. They are the children of a couple who left the hotel one morning and never came back, and I am now raising them.”
One woman with a school-aged child said she disliked the poor education her child was receiving from Chicago Public Schools.
Most of the women complained, “Not enough has been done for us.”
Several said NGO workers talked to them about the importance of voting and gave them information on how they can vote.
They constantly worry about their children and their valuables.
“The police are trying, but many of the people who came with us came out of prisons. Some are known murderers. It is because of them we don’t feel safe,” one woman said.
Drunkenness and fighting in the hotel are now the biggest problems, they said.
“It used to be rape, grown men raping young girls. But the Chicago police did a good job of cracking down on that,” a woman said.
Everybody wants out of the hotel, but getting placed in permanent housing has been a slow process due to short supply.
“We are being told that the city will put us in apartments and houses and that the city will pay for it,” several women said.
Hub for Crime
A compilation of incident reports by the Chicago Police Department for one of the city’s large migrant shelters, obtained by Newsome through a FOIA request, provided a picture of the crime issue.The former Standard Club, an 11-story building now converted into a shelter that once housed 800 residents, is located at 320 South Plymouth Court in the Loop.
From Jan. 1, 2021, through Sept. 13, 2024, police records chronicled 157 serious crime incidents in or near the shelter, including in places of worship, businesses, residential yards, parking lots and structures, sidewalks, and hospital grounds.
The alleged offenses include six first-degree murders, five assaults on police officers, 27 sex crimes, 49 assaults, seven armed robberies, 11 auto thefts, 20 burglaries and home invasions, 26 retail or personal thefts, and six occurrences of criminal property damage.
Not included in the above numbers were incident reports of scores of lesser crimes and hundreds of traffic violations, as well as the many crimes that went unreported to police.
The city recently closed the Standard Club shelter and is seeking to relocate its residents to other facilities.
The media are denied entrance to the shelters and access to their managers. Reporters are told to contact director Mary May of the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications for information.
When contacted by The Epoch Times for comment, May referred all questions to the press office of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
The mayor’s press office did not respond to requests for comment.
Long-time DuPage County state’s attorney Bob Berlin did not respond to requests for comment on the spillover of illegal immigrant crime into the suburbs.
Catholic Charities did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
