As buses full of migrants arrive in the Chicago suburbs, residents debate their city's role

In other times, the small brick Metra station in the suburban Chicago city of Wilmette was just a place where commuters grabbed lattes and waited on black metal benches before boarding the train into the city.

Nowadays it has also become a kind of welcome center for migrants.

Large cardboard boxes full of coats, hats and gloves are neatly lined up along one wall. Volunteers work there daily, accepting donations of socks, puffy North Face jackets, snow pants and bars of soap. When busloads of migrants are dropped off in Wilmette — where their escorts help them catch a train into downtown Chicago to be transferred to a shelter — they are first met by volunteers at the Wilmette station and given a few essentials.

Chicago's migrant crisis is intensifying far beyond the city limits. For more than a month, city officials said, buses from Texas have avoided Chicago entirely, dropping off hundreds of migrants in suburban neighborhoods who have received no warning that they are on their way. In December Chicago issued fines for bus operators who drop off passengers outside the specified times and locations or without a permit. The dynamic has played out elsewhere, sending some migrants to the suburbs of New York City in New Jersey.

As drop-offs have proliferated in Chicago-area suburbs, residents concerned about the migrants' well-being have raised money and collected supplies. Many municipalities have quickly adopted rules limiting the number of buses, similar to restrictions in Chicago, in hopes of staying out of the fray. And some suburban residents are approaching their elected officials with increasing apprehension, making their feelings clear: We want no part of the migrant crisis.

In Wilmette, a city of 27,000 where the median household income is about $183,000, dozens of residents have mobilized to help migrants with clothing and other needs before boarding trains to the so-called landing zone in downtown Chicago, where they are then transported. taken to shelters in the city.

Jessica Leving Siegel, a nonprofit marketing consultant, was lugging trash bags around the Metra station one evening last week and directing fellow volunteers. Ms. Leving Siegel, wearing a messy bun and a maroon T-shirt printed with the words “We are all refugees,” has organized clothing drives and helped migrants earn money by clearing snowy sidewalks in Wilmette.

“What I would like to see is for us to become the suburban landing zone,” she said.

Perhaps the city can also find landlords willing to rent to migrant families, she suggested. Or volunteers in Wilmette could open a “free store,” modeled after one in Chicago, offering donated items to asylum seekers in need.

If Chicago is overwhelmed by the flow of migrants, Ms. Leving Siegel said, there must also be a role for suburban communities.

“We obviously have so many people who want to help,” she said. “Rather than just saying, 'While we shuffle you to the Metra, we'll throw a jacket over you,' I think there's a lot more we can do.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who leads a city of 2.7 million, has indicated he wants other Illinois cities to help accommodate the newly arrived migrants.

On Wednesday, Mr. Johnson said he would like Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a fellow Democrat, to set up new migrant shelters outside Chicago. Although there are already 28 shelters in the city, Mr. Johnson said Chicago's resources are being strained by the number of new migrants in his care — more than 14,000, at last count — and that he has no plans to create even more shelters.

“Shelters don't just have to be set up and built in the city of Chicago,” Mr. Johnson said said. “The state can do it wherever they want.”

Oak Park, a city just west of Chicago, has that dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support migrants, including federal funds, as well as last week extended shelter assistance for another month. Other suburbs seemed much less eager to get involved.

Mayor Mike Turner of Woodstock, Illinois, said he felt sympathy for the migrant families who were unexpectedly dropped off in his city in late December and then taken by commuter train to Chicago, about an hour to the southeast.

But Mr. Turner, who described himself as “a bleeding-heart liberal conservative” in charge of a diverse city with a sizable Latino population, said the issue came down to resources.

“There are people who think, maybe we should do more,” he said. “We all agree that these people matter because they are human beings. But we don't have the ability to control immigration in the long term.”

Woodstock, like many other small towns, does not have homeless shelters or a robust government infrastructure that could provide housing or other important needs for migrants from Venezuela, the country where most asylum seekers come from.

Speaking to other mayors in the Chicago area, Mr. Turner said, “We all agree that this is not something that we as smaller municipalities can manage.”

Mary May, a spokeswoman for Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, said the last bus to drop off newly arrived migrants in the city was the night of Dec. 25. Because it violated city rules on drop-off times and reporting requirements – the bus was impounded, leading some to wonder if bus companies were now reluctant to enter Chicago. A similar phenomenon has occurred in New Jersey, when busloads of migrants bound for New York City were dropped in the suburbs to circumvent city rules.

A spokesman for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who has pushed to send new migrants to cities like Chicago, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Buses are still allowed to take migrants into downtown Chicago provided they follow the city's rules, leaving some people wondering why suburban drop-offs are becoming the norm.

“I think it's just to cause more problems, to cause more confusion,” said Michele Carney, a volunteer with the nonprofit Nuevos Vecinos, as she collected a surplus of donated items in Wilmette that she wanted to return to migrants in the city. . “They drive past Chicago to get all the way to Wilmette. Why?”

In Naperville, an affluent suburb of Chicago and the fourth-largest city in Illinois, a city council member has pushed back on the idea that public resources should be used to support asylum seekers.

Josh McBroom, who describes himself as politically conservative, dryly suggested at a recent council meeting that Naperville residents who support helping immigrant families could welcome them into their own homes.

In an interview, Mr. McBroom said that so far no one has taken up his idea.

Instead, he said, the unspoken wish of many residents is for migrants to leave Naperville as quickly as they arrive. “Get on the train, go to Chicago, nice to meet you, but keep moving,” he said, expressing what he believes is a dominant attitude in the city.

Ida Fiore, a volunteer from Lake Forest, Illinois, who has helped organize care packages for migrants, said that since a bus full of migrants arrived in nearby Highland Park in December, city officials and residents have worked to gather supplies for them.

The migrant crisis that has become increasingly visible in Chicago since late 2022 — with families sitting on sidewalks in the Loop and other neighborhoods and asking for money on cardboard signs — has felt more distant in the suburbs until recently, she said.

“The crisis is so evident in the city,” Ms. Fiore said. “We ask ourselves, 'What is the housing scenario for these people? Can a suburb provide some support and relief in the longer term?' And we all look at each other and have way more questions than answers.”