More than 10,000 migrants have arrived in Chicago since August 2022 – NBC Chicago

More than 10,000 migrant asylum seekers have arrived in Chicago since the first bus sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott arrived in the city in late August 2022, city officials say.

The continued influx comes as volunteers and elected officials work to accommodate arriving migrants with temporary shelters and other needed resources.

According to a city spokesperson, 10,019 migrants have arrived in Chicago in the past nine months, including 4,151 migrants currently residing in temporary shelters in the city.

Of the more than 10,000 migrants who have arrived since last August, 5,573 arrived by bus while 4,446 people arrived in Chicago by other means.

The city’s response to arriving migrants has served as a political flashpoint, with a tense meeting at Wilbur Wright College in Dunning showing a divide in how communities wish to respond.

In another part of town, local authorities and residents are working to integrate those new to the community.

A number of elementary school-age children who have recently arrived in Chicago from Central and South America and are staying in a temporary shelter in Little Village will not get much respite to break the books.

With summer just weeks away for CPS pupils, dozens of migrant children staying at a temporary shelter in Little Village joined a nearby primary school earlier this week, local Ald. said Mike Rodriguez (22nd).

“Even if it’s only two weeks, it’s two weeks,” he told the Sun-Times at an event near the school last week. “Kids should be in school.”

The school, near 27th Street and Kostner Avenue, is about half a mile from where the local alderman established a temporary shelter for migrants at Piotrowski Park earlier this month.

Rodriguez was unsure how many students would enroll, but estimated that of the 200 migrants there, around 40 to 50 children would join primary school and up to a dozen secondary school students could soon join the Little Village Lawndale High School.

“Despite the fact that this is a crisis, a man-made crisis, caused by xenophobic and racist policies of southern governors, we should also see this as an opportunity to bring new energy and l revitalized immigration spirit to our community. ,” he said.

“It reinforces who we are. We are welcoming, we are migrants and the people who arrive become part of our society. They become taxpayers, tenants and eventually landlords, they fill our classrooms, they do essential work, they are us.

The welcome they received stands in stark contrast to the pushback immigrants faced in some parts of the city.

“As an immigrant community, we are naturally positioned with resources and neighbors who are very welcoming to migrants,” he said.

As much as the neighborhood has to offer migrants, Rodriguez said their arrival could bode well for the neighborhood’s future.

“I hope they will stay and become a fabric of our community, as Mexican immigrants did decades ago, and Eastern European and Polish immigrants did a generation before them. “, said the alderman.

CPS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.