Nearly 100 asylum-seekers who made a home at a community-run shelter in Pilsen must leave the building by Sept. 3 due to a confluence of bad luck that includes a lack of funding and volunteers.
Officials learned last week of the fate of the building said Lucia Moya, chief of staff of Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th, whose office initially helped to gather volunteers and stakeholders in the community to open the space as a shelter in May to relieve crowding at the 12th District police station on the Near West Side.
News of the closure has raised frustrations among migrants who fear returning to police stations for shelter, but it wasn’t a total surprise.
The potential closing of the shelter was discussed with the residents over the past month, explaining to migrants that resources were scarce — including funding and volunteers — according to Anna Distefano, a head volunteer with Todos Para Todos, collective that was formed to exclusively help the shelter.
The volunteers held weekly meeting with residents. The Binational Institute of Human Development also got notice that its request to officiate the building as a shelter was not accepted by Illinois Department of Human Services.
Three weeks ago, the Binational Institute received a phone call from the owner that due to insurance circumstances, they wouldn’t be able to continue operations at the shelter.
Despite the grim news, volunteers worked to keep the shelter running, providing migrants with three meals a day and any resources possible, “but we simply can’t sustain it anymore,” Distefano said.
Then last Thursday, the volunteers got word that confirmed the shelter’s closing and advised the migrants that there was nothing they could do, and instead, worked to develop plan to relocate the shelter’s residents.
“It’s sad, but we did our very best, and we will continue to do our best to help asylum-seekers,” Distefano said.
The number of volunteers is significantly less than it was when the shelter opened. Many of the volunteers, including Distefano herself, are educators and can no longer assist during the day.
When Bebsabeth Padron, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, learned that the shelter was closing, she panicked.
“I have no idea where we are going to go,” she said Tuesday afternoon as she sat outside the building in Pilsen. While many of the friends who stayed at the shelter had moved out, Padron said she and her partner remained because they’ve been unable to find affordable housing.
Other migrants complained about the lack of order and maintenance to the building from those who oversaw it. Most recently, they said garbage has not been picked up, the bathrooms are not getting cleaned and beds aren’t made.
The shelter was initially run solely by volunteers in the community, including the owner of the building, near Racine Street and 21st Place, who agreed to let them use the massive warehouse to house asylum-seekers as buses filled with migrants began to arrive in the city, turning police stations into shelters and stretching the city’s finances.
Eventually, the Binational Institute of Human Development, a nonprofit, became its fiscal agent.
Netza Roldan, the institute’s CEO, said the group opened up the space to fill in where the city was failing to provide support for new arrivals.
“We basically are doing their job,” Roldan said. “We are helping immigrants with housing, with meals, with medical care, with legal education and representation. I demand (for) the city of Chicago to open their eyes, because they’re not prepared for these types of situations.”
“We’ve been trying to get assistance from the city of Chicago, and the city has denied any and every type of assistance,” Roldan added. “We have paid for security guards with our own money.”
In a statement late Tuesday, a city spokesperson said officials “looked at the facility as a possible shelter, unfortunately it did not meet requirements in terms of size and other issues.” The statement said city would release a request for purchase for community-based organizations to apply to operate shelters in city-owned or -leased facilities.
Sigcho-Lopez attended a meeting with the residents last Thursday after the collective of volunteers asked him to go, said Joselyn Walsh, another Todos Para Todos volunteer.
“The migrants felt abandoned and upset at the news of the potential closing of the shelter,” Walsh said. At the meeting, Sigcho-Lopez told the residents that he would do everything he could to keep the shelter open, she added.
“I worry that that’s not going to happen and we will no longer be there to help,” Walsh said. “There have been empty promises in the past. We want the closing to be as smooth as possible and encourage them to find permanent housing instead.”
Many worry that they’ll lose their jobs, since they’ll have to move or wait to be sent to a city shelter at a police station. Mothers are upset that they will need to transfer their kids to other schools, or take them out of school until they figure out the situation.
The Pilsen shelter has faced complaints from its residents all summer. But some of them said they are grateful to all the people who came together to help them get out of police station floors and into a safe space. Community members came together to give families air mattresses, build showers, clean clothes and hot meals every day.
“It was a beautiful thing,” Walsh said. “We are no longer able to provide a safe environment anymore.”
Tribune reporter Nell Salzman contributed.
