Appalling conditions have been uncovered at a Chicago warehouse turned migrant shelter where more than 2,500 asylum seekers are staying.
Complaints about cockroaches, rats, rotten food, exposed pipes, sewage issues, spreading illnesses, and inadequate food and water provisions have been made to the city authorities, in emails first reported by WTTW, the PBS member station in Chicago.
Serious public safety concerns about the shelter, on the city’s South Side, were prompted in December when five-year-old Jean Carlos Martinez, who was staying there with his family, died there, while others were hospitalized. Though the cause of death has not been specified and is under investigation, Borderless magazine, which first reported the boy’s death, spoke to a migrant at the shelter who said the boy had a high fever and was convulsing before going to the emergency room.
The report by Borderless concluded that conditions relayed by residents at the shelter do not reach UN minimum standards for emergency refugee shelter.
The city is now under fire since email complaints about the shelter were sent to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office two months earlier, in October 2023.
Kely Ramos is currently staying at the facility, which is called the Pilsen shelter, while her application for asylum in the US is assessed by federal authorities. She arrived nearly a month ago after a three-month journey by foot from Venezuela with her husband and six-year-old son. She expressed mixed feelings about the situation, saying on the one hand she was grateful to be at the shelter because she’s no longer sleeping on the street, but on the other she is also alarmed because a lot of people there are constantly getting sick, she said.
“People get sick a lot here,” she said last week by phone. Media are not given access to the shelter. Many of the migrants there have high fevers, she said. “Even my son has lost a lot of weight. He doesn’t want to eat the food, and that really hits me hard.” Ramos has had to go outside the shelter to find milk and cereal for her son, some of which is given to her by volunteers.
When people fall sick at the shelter, Ramos explained, generally they are moved to a place more isolated from others – but that sometimes then staffers forget to bring them food. When they do bring food, she doesn’t think it is healthy to eat, such as sticky pasta with an unpleasant-tasting sauce, she said.
“But again, who are we to be demanding?” she said.
Annie Gomberg, an organizer with the Police Station Response Team of volunteers, said that a contractor used by the city, Favorite Healthcare Staffing, was hired to provide food, medical assistance, bedding, laundry services and more at the hastily established, city-run shelters for migrants.
“City shelters have been a problem since their inception,” she said. The company “is making millions and millions of dollars to run the shelters”, she added.
Chicago last fall renewed its contract with Favorite Healthcare Staffing. The Kansas-based company has faced criticism over the last year for charging what some local elected officials have described as “exorbitant” fees.
At a separate shelter, in the city’s Greektown neighborhood, some of the migrants said the situation there is also problematic. Maria, a Venezuelan migrant, has been staying there for five months with her husband and two young children, aged 10 and 11. She said she hardly eats because people often get sick from the food. She said she isn’t sure if what is provided is actually meat or “something else”.
She asked to withhold her last name for fear of retaliation. “Then they’ll kick me and my family out of here,” she said, speaking to the Guardian on her daughter’s birthday. “I feel sorry that I don’t have anything to offer her, like a cake.”
Maria said he often wakes up feeling depressed. “Sometimes [my children] see me cry and they tell me, ‘Come here, give me a hug,’ and I have to hide so they don’t see me cry.”
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She said shelter staff have made it clear to everyone there that they cannot take photos and videos while in the shelter and share them with anyone.
There are long lines to use the two bathrooms available, there is constant surveillance with regular “checks” and curfews are a part of everyday life. Staff members call each family by an assigned number affixed to each cot. “It feels like you are in prison,” Maria said.
Regarding allegations about shelter conditions, a statement from Johnson’s office said the city was aware of them, is working on improvements in the shelters and has been meeting weekly with food providers.
A spokesperson added that “because of the rapid expansion of this shelter population, the city had to make improvements to the shelter, while, at the same time, intaking hundreds of new arrivals”.
Favorite Healthcare Staffing did not return the Guardian’s request for comment about standards at shelters.
With winter temperatures in Chicago dropping to dangerous levels and some people sheltering in tents outdoors, the city began in November to clear people out of police station lobbies, where hundreds of migrants slept for months.
City officials have been able to move people out of police stations and more shelters have opened. More than 14,500 migrants are living in 28 of those shelters. Those who are not temporarily housed in shelters are sleeping in library basements and spare rooms in churches, and some are sheltering in tents and sleeping inside buses at Chicago’s “landing zone”, where last week the Chicago Tribune reported migrants were digging through trash bins in search of food.
Since August 2022, about 31,000 people have been sent to Chicago from the US-Mexico border in Texas by bus, without coordinating with city authorities or organizations, as part of an effort by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, obliging Chicago, and other Democratic-run major cities, to deal with accommodating asylum seekers, while also deliberately embarrassing the Biden administration.
