Migrants won’t get booted from shelters next week as planned, but some stuck sleeping on buses as brutal weather rolls in

As a snowstorm and below-freezing temps bear down on Chicago, the city announced migrants facing eviction from shelters next week won’t get booted — though those at the city’s designated “landing zone” for new arrivals remain confined to buses.

The city had planned to evict dozens of migrants who had reached the 60-day limit starting Tuesday, but citing the extreme cold, officials said they would set back the exit date a week during a news conference Friday.

After eviction, migrants will be able to reapply for shelter at the “landing zone” at 800 S. Des Plaines St., where more than 140 new arrivals are sleeping on CTA buses waiting for placement in city shelters, including 22 minors, according to the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

There are no permanent structures at the site, and almost all were sheltering inside the buses, where many have said conditions are crowded and uncomfortable.

“There’s about 60 people on there,” said one migrant from Venezuela Friday, “sleeping on the seats, underneath, everywhere.”

The 30-year-old was standing outside waiting to see if a car would come bringing donations, namely boots.

“My feet are frozen,” he said, pointing to his soaked gym shoes. “I stand out here awhile until I can’t stand it, go back in to warm up, and then back outside again.”

New arrivals receive some winter clothes from the city, but often many are reliant on volunteers for necessities like shoes, gloves and hats.

Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times

Mayor Brandon Johnson addressed the lack of necessities at Friday’s news conference.

“We want to provide as much care as we possibly can to these families, and we’re doing just that,” he said. But “without the federal government stepping in, this condition is not sustainable.”

The city has received more than 30,000 migrants since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing them from the border in August 2022.

About 14,600 are housed at city shelters. Evictions have been delayed to Jan. 22.The city did not say how many eviction notices would come due that day, although it could be as many as several hundred, according to a Sun-Times analysis of city data.

Migrant advocates, who have been appealing the city’s shelter-limit policy in letters and petitions, applauded the delay but said they hope the policy will be abandoned altogether or delayed until there are more resources for migrants to find housing.

“It’d be so easy to extend it until there’s an actual plan in place, and we have actual social workers in shelters helping to determine how we’re going get people into housing,” said Erika Villegas, a volunteer at the landing zone Friday. “Let’s not scramble again in a couple days and [instead] plan this properly.”

Migrants in some shelters have received rental assistance through a state program, but many of those people have had trouble finding apartments that will accept the state program, and the program is only offered to a fraction of migrants in shelters.

Only a few dozen of the hundreds expected to be forced to exit shelters Jan. 22 will have had that assistance.

“It’s a broken system,” Villegas said. “We want people to become independent, but legally they can’t work, and to be able to find housing in Chicago, you need to have a job, you need to have income, you need to have credit.”

As a Realtor, Villegas has been trying to pull strings to help people find housing, including the family of a 5-year-old boy who fell ill at a shelter and died.

“We cannot push people into homelessness and have the greater problems that are going to arise from that,” she said. “These are good people, they just need a little bit of help.”

Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times

Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times

Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times

Contributing: Mary Norkol

Michael Loria is a staff reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.