For the past five months since arriving in Chicago, Andrea Carolina Sevilla’s parents have been unable to enroll her in school even though the reason they left everything in their native Venezuela was so that she would have access to a better education.
In Venezuela, he said, he was lucky to be able to go to school. Many other teenagers start working at an early age to help their families, who often face extreme poverty.
But he didn’t have the same luck in the city he once dreamed of visiting. The family went from sleeping in a police station flat, to a crowded shelter, to a house in the south end of the neighborhood, then back to the police station flat after his stepfather Michael Castejon, 39, could not afford it. rent He couldn’t find a job that paid enough without a work permit, he said.
On November 3 they proposed to return to Texas. And from there, they would go to Venezuela, the country they fled to seek asylum in the United States. They are among the countless migrants who have chosen to leave Chicago in recent weeks in search of a better life. They seek warmer weather, more resources, or meeting friends and family elsewhere.
A family of five left for Detroit because another migrant told them there was work. A man returned to Texas, where he will be reunited with his cousins after trying his luck in Chicago. Over the past month, at least 40 people, including Sevilla’s family, have flown out of Chicago from the 1st District station on the Near South Side with the help of Catholic Charities of Chicago.
“The American dream doesn’t exist anymore,” Castejon said as he laid on a blanket on the station’s bare floor the afternoon before he left. “There is nothing here for us,” he added.
Migrants said they realize the city is at a breaking point. Not only is there no more space in the shelters, but they also recognize that some residents in Chicago are opposed to more shelters being opened for them. Castejon said that despite the dangerous journey to get here, often begging for money and sleeping on the streets to cross multiple borders, the journey had not been worth it.
His attempts to settle in the city failed. He said he had never felt comfortable in a shelter and that the hot meals, stipends and good jobs he had heard about from other migrants never materialized. The father did not consider that once in the country, the family would not be granted asylum immediately and would not even get a work permit while they waited.
It could have been misinformation, he said. Or that the benefits that those who came to the city before him, are no longer available due to the amount of people there are now. But even after learning that the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program was expanded and the process for obtaining work permits could be expedited, he decided he was exhausted and chose not to wait.
“We didn’t know things would be this difficult,” he said. “I thought the process was faster.”
More than 2,000 people have received monetary assistance from the state through Catholic Charities to move to other states with family and friends, according to Katie Bredemann, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities of Chicago. The program has been part of their effort to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Chicago and give migrants a chance to be reunited with families or reach the city they wanted to go to before being sent to Chicago.
“The state of Illinois determines who is eligible for relocation to other states, then Catholic Charities helps to help arrange the travel,” Bredemann said in an email.
But while some migrants choose to leave, many more still arrive each week. In what could be considered a revolving door for taxpayers, for example, Catholic Charities of Chicago is using Illinois taxpayer dollars to transport migrants who want to return to Texas or other states, while simultaneously Catholic Charities of San Antonio and the city of Denver are using federal taxpayer money to send new migrants to Chicago.
As of Friday, there were 20,700 migrants who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending migrants to sanctuary cities like Chicago, in part to protest federal immigration policies .
Castejon said Chicago was not what they expected when they arrived in June. But the father was determined to succeed, he said.
The family was first taken to the 1st District police station, where they stayed for a couple of weeks before being transferred to Wright College with hundreds of other asylum seekers. The family lived there for about a month before moving into a house with another migrant who was renting a flat through a city voucher program that provides up to $15,000 for up to six months of rental assistance.
But when the rental assistance went away, neither could afford the rent, so they went back to homelessness, the father said.
Eventually they met someone who offered to rent them an apartment for $750. They allowed it because Castejon had found work in construction, where they paid him in cash. But the work was hard and the pay wasn’t enough, he said, so he left.
Unable to pay the rent, the family returned to the 1st District station, where they waited for about two weeks before packing up their belongings, mostly collected through donations, and returning to Venezuela.
As a patriarch, he said he felt helpless not being able to support his wife and daughter, he said.
“How many more months of living on the street? No, nothing more. I better go. At least I have my mother at home,” he said angrily.
He said the family decided to seek asylum in the United States because of the extreme poverty they lived in under Venezuela’s authoritarian regime. But the trip wasn’t worth it, he said.
“We just want to be home,” he said. “If we’re going to sleep on the streets here, we’d rather sleep on the streets there.”
The first few cold days influenced the family’s decision to contact Catholic Charities staff, pushing for plane tickets that would take them to a border town to find their way home. When they got word that they had been approved and had their tickets in hand, Castejon was relieved, he said.
The sense of disappointment and helplessness that Castejon felt is shared by many of the migrants, said Brayan Lozano, head of the volunteer group for the 1st District Police Station Response Team.
As an asylum seeker, Lozano understands firsthand the experience migrants go through: the environment they’ve fled from their home countries and their expectations for the United States, which may have been influenced by social media and word of mouth from the first group of migrants to arrive in Chicago. There may have been more resources when they first arrived in August 2022, he said.
While many, including Castejon’s family, are leaving, others still hope to find shelter in hotel rooms, access public services and cash assistance, or live the American dream.
A proposed ballot question asking Chicagoans whether the city should retain its sanctuary city designation has roiled the City Council in recent weeks, and groups led by immigrants and blacks gathered Thursday morning on the other side of the town hall street to urge “solidarity, not division”. to respond to the migration crisis.
“Like many people, we are here for a better life. I’m grateful to God and I’m just following a dream to be able to provide more for my family,” said Ana, a Venezuelan teacher who came to Chicago in September because she couldn’t afford to live on her salary . at home.
The teacher spoke in Spanish through a translator.
“I’m here to continue to advocate for Chicago to be a sanctuary city, for there to be resources for everyone, for us immigrants, to continue to get the help that we deserve, because everyone deserves a sun that shines on them,” he said. said
Lozano said several migrants who went from staying in suburban hotel rooms to apartments with the help of the city-state resettlement program received help filing their immigration cases. asylum, they found work working under the table, like many people living in the country. without authorization they do it, and they are settling in the city.
But resources have been exhausted for the most recent arrivals and the resettlement program has been overwhelmed by the number of migrants arriving.
Lozano said there is a lot of misinformation flowing within the asylum seeker community about what is really going on in Chicago.
As snow and rain have arrived with colder temperatures, the reality for migrants caught sleeping outside police stations has turned dire. The mattresses are damp, the smell inside the tents is sticky, damp and pungent. They eat standing up and rub their hands together to keep warm.
“Word of the situation in Chicago is starting to spread,” Lozano said.
Jose Nauh, 22, decided to give Texas another chance and returned earlier this month after sleeping in a Chicago police station for more than two weeks.
He came to Chicago even though he has family in Houston because the ticket was free, he said, and he wanted to see what the buzz was about.
Like Castrejon, he felt there was housing, food and other public benefits. “That’s not true,” he said.
He grabbed a pink backpack, said goodbye to Lozano and rushed into a white car that took him to O’Hare International Airport to board a plane south.
That same day Diana Vera, her three children and daughter-in-law boarded a bus to Detroit, hoping a cousin would take them in once they arrived.
“We heard there are a lot of jobs there even if you don’t have a permit,” said the mother as she brushed her hair while sitting on a blanket on the floor of the police station that had been her home for almost a month.
Vera was also discouraged from staying after hearing from migrants in the city’s shelters that the conditions are overcrowded, the food is cold and there are no real beds.
“Sounds worse than sleeping in the police station,” he said.
Chicago Tribune’s Nell Salzman and AD Quig contributed.
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