The border crisis landed in Chicago around Christmas in 2023.
Shipped up from Texas, migrants arriving by the busload quickly outstripped local capacity to house them. Temporary city shelters overflowed. Sprawling tent camps lined sidewalks near police stations. For days and weeks, politicians and area residents worried what could be done for these hopeful hundreds, now stranded in a strange city with a Midwest winter bearing down.
Most of these migrants were asylum seekers, known people who hadn’t snuck across the border illegally. They were seeking permanent residence away from violence and starvation, leaving behind friends and families and their birthplaces. In Texas, they’d filled out the paperwork. They just wanted to make their case.
Many who ended up in the Oak Park area likely passed through the doors of the Oak Park Migrant Ministry. The interfaith project, sponsored by the Catholic Parishes of Oak Park, is housed in a former Catholic school in Forest Park. Each Tuesday, any migrant who might need it can get a hot breakfast, some clothes or help translating legal documents.
Celine Woznica, a ministry volunteer, recalled when the first big waves of migrants started arriving in late 2022, the ministry was performing something like emergency services. When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began bussing people to Illinois, the shelters set up in Chicago quickly exploded and migrants packed into tents near police stations. Woznica helped deliver clothes, air mattresses, tents and more to the families, but they also needed showers, so the Catholic church opened up the St. Catherine’s-St. Lucy’s rectory two blocks from Chicago’s 15th District police station.
“It’ll only be four a couple of weeks,” Woznica recalls thinking. That church rectory became a central hub for showers, clothing, electric fans, suitcases — anything anyone might need while living in a tent or after moving into a new apartment.
“They were not coming for showers, they were coming for all the other stuff,” Woznica said. “I remember Father Leandro (Fossá) from Melrose Park pulling up with several vans filled with everything. They’re a largely Hispanic community, struggling themselves.”
Woznica said the flood of supplies was so great, the rectory couldn’t contain it all.
“We had to spill into the church,” she said. “We turned it into a Famous Footwear. It was a mess, but it was what a church should be.”
These days the ministry runs like a machine. Each room in the former Catholic school has a small free store with bedding, clothing for adults and children, toiletry items and so on. Volunteers hand out a folder of emergency services information. Inside is a legal document signing over custody of their children should the parents be spirited away by federal agents. In some cases, migrants have given birth in the United States, meaning their children are American citizens, some two or three years old, and have a right to be in the country.
“It will be difficult to work through this packet and complete the necessary documents, but it is one way to reduce the fear of who will take care of your children if you should be detained by ICE,” a welcome note from the Rev. Carl Morello states in the packet, which urges them to appoint temporary custodians for their children, should they be seized and taken away by immigration officials.
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Many parents are too horrified to consider leaving their children with other people and refuse to fill out the paperwork.
“So many people would say, ‘I’m leaving this in the hands of God.’ Well, Father Carl wrote, ‘God will never abandon you, but you still need to do what you need to do,’” explained Celine Woznica, a ministry volunteer.
Some of those are still awaiting word on their fate, still hoping. Many have court dates. Some have left the area looking for work or other immigrant communities. Many have work permits, and many are seeking a legal path toward permanent residency. They’ve still got a path, a legal hope to stay here, If they could just plead their case.
Angel Suarez will plead his case in November. He’s an immigrant from Venezuela who has been in the Chicago area three years already. He’s had one court date just to establish he was still in the area and his address, but the crucial date is coming up. He’s hopeful.
“He who deserves to be here will be here,” Suarez explained through a translation app. “That’s how it is. Each one will have his time in court to show the truth and that they deserve to be here.”
His court date had been scheduled for next year, but hearings have been ramping up at an accelerated pace. Suarez doesn’t have a lawyer — he can’t afford one — but he believes he can show he belongs here.
“Of course,” he said. “It’s been almost three years. I love this country. it’s very different to mine. I would love to stay here. But whatever it is, it’s what fate wants.”
Suarez has a job these days with his car delivering for Instacart and similar companies. He said he’s applied for a more regular job and is hoping to hear something soon.
His story isn’t unique, explained Cynthia Brito.
“They’re working and saving money,” she said.
Brito is a longtime immigrant advocate and activist, and a newly-minted PhD of urban planning, who has been working with Oak Park-based aid groups since 2022. She’s also one of the first people Suarez met when he landed in Chicago.
Brito is a friend and advocate to many migrants, and she’s seen the same storyline over and over.
“They know (their status) is not guaranteed,” she said. “It’s not something they can depend on. They think, ‘Let me work, work, work and do as much as I can because something might happen to me.”
“Yeah, it’s very scary,” Suarez said. He explained that most migrants like him come with nothing but their clothes. He said he got some MREs in McAllen, Texas near the border. Over the last three years, he’s bought a car, he has an apartment and he’s got a life here. If a judge decides against him, that’s all gone.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “We’re afraid to start again. Because when they take you out of here, you leave with nothing and there’s fear. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen.”
In the three years since their arrival, the immigration system has become a whole lot tougher to navigate.
“It’s not like other policies, like the Constitution, that don’t change all the time,” explained Brito. “With immigration law it’s a free-for-all.”
Last October, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end the temporary protected status of Venezuelan migrants — a protection that had been granted to people fleeing from dangerous, unsafe countries. Since then, Venezuela was rocked by a major earthquake and the United States seized president Nicolas Maduro, though it left his cohorts in power.
Suarez was no fan of Maduro and he praised Trump for getting rid of the leader. That said, Suarez said that alone didn’t fix Venezuela, which is still mired in poverty and under control of the same regime.
“How do you recover from 27 years of terror, of hunger, of harassment in a few months,” he said. “You have to wait and see the results.”
But Suarez may not have time — come November, he may be forced back. His court date, along with thousands of others, was pushed forward. The federal government is now hearing hundreds of immigration cases at once in so-called mega-master hearings, churning through lives in a language many don’t speak.
By all accounts, the mega hearings are chaotic, crowded nightmares of confusion. Brito should know, she’s been there.
“At these master hearings people are getting detained and deported and not just deported to their home countries,” she said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The lucky migrants have legal counsel and can speak English or they have access to a translator. Many don’t. The federal immigration court on Monroe Street gets so thick with people, Brito said, it’s a fire hazard. It’s chaos in an immigration system filled with chaos.
“DHS is there screaming at people and they’re treating people like garbage, in English,” she said. “People don’t even understand what the hell they’re doing and the staff and the judge look overwhelmed. … It’s super, super messed up.”
Outside the courtroom these days, the families now fear harassment by immigration agents, or arrest or worse. An arrest could mean months in immigration custody. They could miss their immigration court date. A traffic stop could tear apart and destroy their American lives.
“A lot of them went back,” Brito said of the migrants she knows. “The anxiety and the stress of it all is so heavy, they say, ‘I’ll just leave.’ Or they’ll have a partner that was detained and they say ‘Well, I’m going to leave.’ Damn, what do you do?”
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To get here, many of these migrants walked through one of the most disease-ridden, dangerous isthmuses on earth. There are no roads, let alone vehicles. There are diseases, bandits and there is danger. If a person gets badly hurt, they’re often left and if they’re left they die. Angel recalled bodies rotting along the way, worms eating the flesh.
“I wouldn’t wish that journey through the jungle on anyone,” Suarez said.
In several weeks, a judge will decide if the journey was worth it.
Jesse Wright is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.