Since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing migrants to Chicago in August 2022, asylum-seekers have transformed the fabric of the city and beyond.
More than 47,200 — mostly from Venezuela — have passed through Chicagoland and tens of thousands have settled here. Local officials have opened up over 20 buildings to temporarily house them and spent hundreds of millions of dollars. They’ve watched their hospitals, schools and food pantries fill with record numbers of people.
Abbott did not produce the migrant crisis over the past two years, but he magnified it, forcing Democrats to reshape their party’s thinking about welcoming immigration promises.
Today, driven by a June executive order issued by President Joe Biden, buses are no longer arriving in Chicago at the same rates as in 2023. The crisis that officials have long grappled with is entering a new phase. Migrants have lived through four seasons in the city. They’re moving into neighborhoods. Some are even coming to the city on their own, hearing it’s a good place to live.
“Our job is creating long-term community connections for these families,” said Matt DeMatteo, executive director and pastor at New Life Centers, a nonprofit organization helping migrants in collaboration with the city and state. “A beautiful tapestry of spaces and places.”
Indeed, while some migrants have found stability through jobs and a community, many others are still trying to survive as they live in challenging conditions, and struggle to find work and go to school.
Out of hundreds of migrants interviewed over the past two years, the Tribune has followed up with five to see how their lives have unfolded in the City of Big Shoulders.
Marilieser Gil-Blanco
Marilieser Gil-Blanco says he wouldn’t be alive now if he hadn’t come to the U.S.
While on his journey from Venezuela last summer with his pregnant wife and daughter, the 24-year-old became paralyzed from the chest down due to a rare condition called transverse myelitis, inflammation of the spinal cord. Like many migrants, he has leaned heavily on volunteers and medical resources in Chicago since he arrived.
For months, caretaking fell solely on the shoulders of his partner, Genesis Chacón. She had to look after a newborn and a 4-year-old while changing his diapers and flipping him over in bed.
After the Tribune reported their story in February, the family received over $80,000 through a GoFundMe page set up by volunteers. However, the money proved challenging to manage between family members. Then pressure rose in March when Gil-Blanco found out Chacón, 23, was dating someone else.
“We started fighting. It got really bad, and in front of our girls,” he said.
Taking care of Gil-Blanco and the children was hard for Chacón, said Emily Wheeler, program manager for the Faith Community Initiative, who has been helping the family.
“In April, she called us and told us she refused to live with (him) anymore, that she was taking the girls and leaving,” Wheeler said.
Chacón used her portion of the money to move to a hotel room. She eventually came back after Gil-Blanco said it would be better for their daughters if she were there. They moved to a different apartment in July.
Gil-Blanco can’t bring himself to schedule an appointment for therapy treatments at Cook County Hospital, which has seen at least 34,800 migrants like Gil-Blanco through 121,000 visits to its health centers and hospitals.
Gil-Blanco often sinks into a deep depression, he said. He has regular dreams that he can walk again. He wishes he could do so many things that he can’t.
On a recent weekday, he sat on a mattress in his new house in the Grand Crossing neighborhood and watched his eldest daughter Mila run around him, her curls bouncing.
“I’ve felt alone,” he said. “But my strength comes from my daughters. I want to see them grow up here.”
Betzabeth Bracho
Betzabeth Bracho, 34, slept on an air mattress at the Calumet District (5th) police station for seven months before moving into a migrant shelter and then an apartment with her husband, Carlos Ramírez, a former police officer in Venezuela.
In June, Bracho said she and Ramírez fled Venezuela because her husband opposed the government under the country’s far-left president, Nicolás Maduro. Bracho said police officers at the station didn’t know that Carlos had also been an officer in his home country.
The couple has come a long way since the Tribune first met them in June last year, when they were eating donated food and using a bucket to shower in the police station bathroom. Bracho works at a nail salon now, and they live in an apartment with several other migrants. But she misses her life in Venezuela. She said she was studying to be a preschool teacher.
“We’re not here because we want to be,” she said.
Bracho and Ramírez left their two sons — ages 9 and 12 — in Venezuela with family. She calls them every day.
Following Maduro’s claim of victory in July’s election, which led to surging protests across Venezuela, Bracho said she’s now concerned about her children’s safety.
“We’ve been talking about how we’re going to take them from Venezuela and bring them to Colombia, or maybe even here,” she said.
In early August, Bracho went to a demonstration in the Loop to protest what many have described as one of the worst moments in the country in over a decade of decline. She wore a shirt on which she had painted “Free Venezuela” in red, yellow and blue.
Yamile Pérez
Last November, Yamile Pérez, 28, took the first steps so that her daughter Keinymar Ávila, a tiny 8-year-old with microcephaly — a condition where a baby’s head is smaller than normal causing seizures, developmental delays and intellectual disability — would be able to go to school. Pérez had traveled thousands of miles for better opportunities for her daughter.
But Keinymar never went. And this year on the first day of classes, she stayed home, battling a 104-degree fever and bedbug bites on her arms and legs.
Pérez blames her daughter’s health on the crumbing apartment in the South Shore neighborhood where they are living.
She says she has tried to wash everything and spray all surfaces. She can’t throw out her clothes and furniture because she doesn’t have money to replace them. On a visit to the apartment in early August, the Tribune saw bedbugs crawling on the Keinymar’s mattress.
Neither Pérez nor her husband have permits to work legally. A workshop run by the federal, state and local governments, working in conjunction with the shelter system has helped more than 8,700 migrants submit applications for permits. But Pérez didn’t know about it, and with the odd jobs she’s picked up, she can’t afford to move to another apartment.
“I just want to be in a place where my daughter is protected,” she said.
Several other migrant families live in the building, she said, and when they shower, water from the upstairs pipes runs down the walls in her bathroom. It’s so bad that even doctors don’t want to do home visits.
“I’ve told the landlord a lot of times that I have a child with special needs,” Pérez said. “They know they need to fix the house.”
Lori Wyatt, who helps manage the property, said exterminators have tried treating Pérez’s apartment multiple times. They’ve instructed her to bag or get rid of her bedding.
“Once you have an infestation like that, it’s just really hard,” Wyatt said.
Pérez said she would return to Venezuela or move to another state if it weren’t for Keinymar’s condition and the network of support she’s built here. While Pérez and her husband work painting and cleaning jobs during the day, she often relies on friends to help at home.
“My little girl is always at risk of having a seizure,” she said.
Her saving grace has been the community of other migrants who live in the same apartment building, especially the children. Her 9-year-old son, Keinar, likes to play in the backyard with them.
A victim of abuse
Two months after she was sexually abused while looking for an apartment in the Roseland neighborhood, a Venezuelan woman — whose name is being withheld because she is a victim — said she was attacked and robbed. She said her immigration papers and valuables were stolen near her home about a month ago.
The two back-to-back incidents have crippled her with fear. While her husband works, she spends most of her time inside their home in the Austin neighborhood. Her sons run around the apartment revving engines on their invisible motorcycles.
The first attack happened at the beginning of summer. Eager to leave the shelter where they were staying, the woman had found an apartment listing on Facebook for a room in the Roseland neighborhood.
As she walked behind Roseland Community Hospital, trying to find the apartment, a man approached her and offered to help. She refused, but he proceeded to back her into an alley, and groped, bit and tore at her clothes, all while her child watched and screamed in a stroller.
“The only thing I could do at that moment was grab (my son). (My son) held on to me and wouldn’t let go,” the woman recalled to the Tribune in July.
Her second attack happened a couple of weeks ago when she was at a birthday party at a friend’s house, she said. She went to a corner store across the street to buy some extra food when a man came after her for her wallet, she said.
“I started screaming. I thought it was the same attacker,” she said.
The woman has received no answers from detectives after she filed a police report in early August.
“What will it take for the detectives to pursue my case?” she asked through tears. “Do I need to be raped and killed?”
Angélica Beltrán
On Monday, Angélica Beltrán, 45, and her son, Engerberth Morales, took a photo in front of the Bean. A week earlier, she threw a party for his ninth birthday. She had a cake with white and green frosting and more than 20 kids were there, all people they’d met since arriving in Chicago last July.
It was a far cry from when the Tribune first met Beltrán and her son, Engerberth, earlier this year, as he cried on his way to school. The family was part of a state housing program that provided $53 million to move migrants into over 6,000 homes, according to data provided by a state spokeswoman.
Although Beltrán expressed gratitude to the state for helping her with six months of rental payments, in their rush to leave the migrant shelter, they had moved to an apartment in Englewood that was too small, and the block felt unsafe.
Recently, they’ve moved into a different apartment in Englewood, where the family has more space and the block is quieter.
Beltrán and her husband, from Venezuela, received work permits several months ago by claiming temporary protected legal status, which allows people from certain countries to live and work in the United States.
The couple has found jobs at restaurants on the South Side. They’re able to make rental payments and are saving up for a car.
Beltrán’s biggest worry now, she said, is enrolling Engerberth in school. He still can’t read. Last year, he stopped going to school because he was embarrassed he didn’t speak English. She had wanted to enroll him in a bilingual school, but there wasn’t one nearby.
“It’s just hard for me to talk to people,” he said.
As of April 12 this year, Chicago Public Schools estimates it has served a total of 9,800 new arrival students. CPS has increased the number of teachers who are certified as bilingual, English as a Second Language or both by nearly 40% since 2018. Still, thousands of kids who have moved to new neighborhoods are adjusting to schools with few Spanish-speaking classmates.
Last year, Beltrán knew the transition from their country hadn’t been easy for Engerberth, so she didn’t push him to go to school. But this year, she planned to try again.
Yoel Guerra
On a baseball diamond on a warm summer night in the Little Village neighborhood, Yoel Guerra stood in a circle with his teammates as they held hands and prayed.
The 16-year-old from Venezuela said he likes Little Village Summer Softball because it’s different from baseball for his school or for his Cubs traveling team. Thursday nights in the summer, he plays with people of all ages, including his stepdad.
Guerra’s family of seven lives nearby, and his little siblings sit on the sidelines of their games. They’ll snack on Cheetos and run around on the fields nearby.
For Guerra, who has been playing baseball since he was 4, the game has become a refuge and a reminder of home. It’s a place to unwind and focus on one thing.
Guerra is not just joyful when he plays baseball but is naturally gifted. His coaches think he has a chance of playing in college. Knowing that, this year he’s focusing on his grades.
He’s also focusing on Farragut Career Academy’s team goals. They moved up divisions after winning their conference last year and they want to win again.
“I love the community here,” Guerra said.
Each day, Guerra said baseball — his country’s most popular sport — gives him something to look forward to and people to look up to in the U.S.
Chicago Tribune’s Joe Mahr contributed.