Mayor Johnson confirms migrant evictions coming, despite measles outbreak and protests

Amid a burgeoning measles outbreak and one day after 18 Chicago City Council members signed a letter urging him to call off his 60-day eviction policy for city migrant shelters, Mayor Brandon Johnson vowed to forge ahead with an untold number of evictions on Saturday.

“This mission — absent federal investment — is unsustainable,” Johnson said at an unrelated event Wednesday, where he was asked about the policy, which has been delayed multiple times, first by cold weather and then by pressure from Council members.

In announcing the last delay in January, Family and Support Services Commissioner Brandie Knazze said 5,673 people would exit March 16. The city hasn’t responded to questions this week about whether that number has grown. Johnson on Wednesday refused to say, stressing there will be “exemptions,” including for extenuating health circumstances or pregnancy, for those “in the process of securing housing” or leaving Chicago altogether.

“There are a number of people who won’t be subject because they fall under that particular dimension of the policy,” Johnson said.

People exiting shelters will be able to reapply for a bed at the city’s designated “landing zone,” at 800 S. Desplaines St.

The city hasn’t given answers on how evictions will be enforced or whether migrants at shelters ranging from Daley College in West Lawn to the Leone Beach Park District field house on the North Side would be provided transportation to the “landing zone.”

Johnson’s determination to enforce shelter stay limits comes after Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th), chairman of the City Council’s Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, shared a letter Tuesday slamming the eviction policy.

“We need an end to this policy, as it doesn’t solve our challenges, it merely exacerbates and displaces them,” the North Side alderman wrote. ‘Your office risks cutting against Chicago’s values and severely harming the same new arrivals Chicago has worked diligently to care for.”

State officials said Wednesday about 10% of the 11,000 migrants in shelters are eligible for employment authorization under federal law, and around 1,300 households are in the process of securing state rental assistance.

Council members last applied similar pressure in late January, and Johnson postponed the day of reckoning. But it was snowing in Chicago then, with single-digit temperatures.

The mayor was not about to put off the evictions again when temperatures are unseasonably warm — not even during a burgeoning measles outbreak at a Pilsen shelter.

“There are public health concerns that could be exacerbated if people who have no rental assistance, no work authorization and significant language barriers are put out on the street,” Vasquez wrote.

Chicago’s measles outbreak was first reported by the city’s Department of Public Health on March 7, and officials confirmed Friday one of those two cases was reported at the migrant shelter on Halsted Street where a 5-year-old was staying before dying from sepsis caused by illnesses known to be circulating there.

Six additional cases were reported Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, although at a roundtable Wednesday, city Health Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo Ige said all eligible migrants at the shelter had been vaccinated and those who were recently vaccinated would have to quarantine.

Ige also said they had begun vaccinating migrants arriving at the city’s landing zone, and officials said they had begun vaccinating residents of other shelters.

Johnson said he is “very sympathetic” to the 18 Council members signing the letter urging him to cancel the evictions.

But he once again pointed the finger at the Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

He urged Council members to join him in signing a letter to Congress urging members to solve the border crisis and “check” Abbott.

“I don’t want to have to find some building that’s been vacant and have to clear it out and clean it up and build it up just so people have somewhere to lay their heads,” he said. But “you have the governor of Texas that is still determined to create chaos in America, and he has decided to attack Chicago first with his illness.”

The shelter stay policy mirrors one in New York City — also an epicenter of the migrant crisis. There, Mayor Eric Adams touted evictions as a way to motivate migrants to find independent housing, and Johnson defended the policy in Chicago for similar reasons.

“What this policy has essentially done is given us the opportunity to have real, substantive conversations with migrants to help them move on,” he said.

New York City officials said Wednesday of the 37,300 individuals served shelter eviction notices, 25% remain in that city’s care.

But New Yorkers on the ground have warned Chicagoans to “expect utter chaos.”

“Be aware that this move is gonna throw away that tiny bit of stability that the families have had since coming here,” said Mammad Mahmoodi, an advocate for New York migrants. “These are children who started school and are making friends — all those small things are ‘poof!’ out the window.”

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.