Chicago closes Daley College migrant shelter as city's asylum seeker population continues to drop
CHICAGO (CBS) -- City officials have closed a migrant shelter that had been operating at Richard J. Daley College since last summer, as the number of asylum seekers in Chicago shelters continues to drop.
The shelter at Daley College opened in June 2023, and housed as many as 415 migrants by July 2023. As of last week, 56 migrants were living there.
The city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications confirmed the shelter was "decompressed" in recent days, and all migrants living there were moved to other shelters or resettled into permanent housing.
As of Tuesday, a total of 5,950 migrants were living in 16 city-run shelters in Chicago, down from a peak of nearly 15,000 in early January.
A new state-funded migrant shelter opened in Hyde Park last month in a former hotel that's been used in the past as a quarantine facility for new arrivals during a measles outbreak. The site can house up to 750 people, but it was unclear how many were staying in that shelter as of Tuesday.
The state also plans to open another new shelter this month for nearly 950 migrants near Midway International Airport.
The governor's office said it would not share the address of either location for safety and privacy concerns.
City and state officials are expecting the number of migrants arriving in Chicago could grow leading up to the Democratic National Convention.
"The additional temporary shelters will ensure that shelter capacity and wraparound services remain accessible to asylum seeker families as they transition out of our system of care and on to independence," Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement last month as the state announced the two new shelters.
More than 44,300 migrants have arrived in Chicago since August 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott first began sending asylum seekers to Chicago and other so-called "sanctuary cities" via buses and planes to protest the Biden administration's immigration policies and attempt to sow division among Democratic leaders.
Chicago city officials have said they expect to keep the existing shelters open at least until after the DNC in August.
Still, some migrant families have said they've been evicted from shelters, despite there being space for them. The city has been executing its 60-day shelter stay policy, offering to reprocess any asylum seeker who asks to reenter the shelter system. As of earlier this month, the city said 970 individuals had exited the shelter system because of the 60-day limit. Of those, 554 had returned to the landing zone at Polk and Desplaines streets to be processed and 536 had reentered the system.
