Alderpeople advance plan to seek weekly reports on Chicago migrant evictions
CHICAGO (CBS) -- More than a week after the city began evicting migrants from Chicago shelters, a key committee backed a plan to require the Johnson administration to provide the City Council with weekly updates on evictions.
Sponsors of the ordinance originally planned to ask for detailed daily reports on migrant evictions, but after leaders at the Department of Family and Support Services said it would be a challenge to provide all of the details being sought on a daily basis.
That prompted members of the Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights to agree to an ordinance demanding weekly reports on the numbers of migrants forced out of city shelters instead.
Those reports would have to include the age, gender, and country of origin of each migrant forced to leave city shelters. The city would also have to list which shelters migrants are moved out of, and the date they are evicted.
In addition, every two weeks, the city would have to file a report on the total number of people staying at each city migrant shelter, the number and type of grievances filed by any migrants staying there, the number and type of grievances that were resolved, the number of migrants granted exemptions from the city's 60-day shelter limit, and the number and date of migrants evicted from each shelter.
Information in those reports would have to made available to the public online.
The city would be required to begin providing those reports within 30 days of then the ordinance passes, meaning May 17 at the earliest if the ordinance is approved by the full City Council at its next regular meeting on April 17.
The city began evicting migrants from shelters on March 17. City officials said a total of 24 migrants have left shelters since then due to the 60-day limit. Migrants forced to leave shelters can return to the city's landing zone to reapply for space in a shelter for another 60 days if they have not yet been able to find permanent housing.
A group of 21 alderpeople has urged Mayor Brandon Johnson to end the eviction policy, and replace it with a new shelter policy that addresses how long migrants can stay on a case-by-case basis.
The city's migrant shelter eviction policy was originally set to begin in January, but was delayed multiple times before the Johnson administration began enforcing it last week.
The start of evictions came after the Johnson administration announced Friday that families with children enrolled in Chicago Public Schools would be allowed to stay in shelters until the end of the school year, essentially exempting most migrants in shelters from the eviction policy until June.
Under the new policy, more than 2,000 migrants now are set to be evicted by April 30.
This ordinance meeting comes as hundreds of migrants staying across five Chicago Park District facilities will be moved to other locations, starting on Saturday, so that those park sites can reopen to the public.
As of Thursday morning, a total of 10,263 migrants were staying in 23 city shelters. Approximately 38,000 migrants have arrived in Chicago since August 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending buses and planes carrying migrants to so-called "sanctuary cities" in protest of President Joe Biden's immigration policies.