The first buses of migrants arrived in the South Side neighborhood of Woodlawn in February, 2023, carrying a hundred men and women who took up residence at the old Wadsworth Elementary School. Wadsworth had sat largely empty since 2013, when the then mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, closed it and roughly fifty other schools in the city. Two residents of Woodlawn, Luis Cardona and Andre Smith—who at the time was campaigning to become the alderman of the Twentieth Ward—stood in front of the buses and tried to stop the passengers from disembarking. Smith eventually stepped to the side, when police officers threatened him with arrest. He told reporters that he had said to the migrants, “It’s nothing against you. The city officials did not come to us to work something out earlier, and we’re not working nothing out now.”
The migrants’ presence created “a pretty hot situation” in Woodlawn, Kenneth Phelps, the senior pastor at Concord Missionary Baptist Church, told me. Phelps, whose mother was a founding member of the church, was practically raised there and has been behind the pulpit for the past twenty-nine years. For much of this past year, he has welcomed migrants to the community, often despite the protests of Woodlawn’s Black residents. In addition to weekly services for the church’s hundred or so regular attendees, Phelps now holds a bilingual service twice a month for about sixty migrants who, for the moment, call Woodlawn home. Phelps is looking to hire a permanent minister and a minister of music, both bilingual, so he can make the biweekly service a weekly gathering.
Phelps now has two churches in one: the church he has pastored for most of his adult life and the migrant-serving church he calls the “home away from home center.” Migrants can access the Internet there. They can learn English, thanks to a partnership Phelps formed with Kennedy-King, a community college. Phelps told me that he has tried to bring African Americans from Woodlawn together with Latin American migrants by hosting meals where they share food prepared by members of both communities—and through “peace circles” in which, with the help of translators and social workers, Phelps asks each group to name “the ten things that you and your community need.” They both say jobs, health care, housing, safety, and food. The next question he asks is “You know, why don’t we work together to fight for these basic needs? Because we all want them.”
Phelps told me that he’s trying to “change the narrative that’s being sown” both by and about Black and Latin American migrant communities in Chicago. He calls it a “discord narrative” that pits them against each other as competitors for jobs, housing, and other community resources. “I just think it’s a very, very dangerous thing to nurture the narrative of discord,” he said, because it makes community members feel like “we’re all fighting over crumbs.”
Since August, 2022, more than thirty-eight thousand migrants have arrived in Chicago. The majority of them have been sent by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, on more than eight hundred buses; they have formed a migrant caravan that departs from border cities like El Paso, Del Rio, McAllen, Laredo, and Brownsville. For the residents of Woodlawn and other predominantly Black neighborhoods, the arrival of migrants hasn’t created a new crisis so much as it has aggravated long-standing ones. During the past several decades, the Black population of Chicago, like the Black population in almost all of America’s biggest cities, has declined significantly. As reasons for Black Chicagoans’ departure, former residents have cited the closing of factories that employed them, better job opportunities elsewhere, the rise of gun violence, the overpolicing of their communities, increasing home costs, and the funding disparities among Chicago’s public schools. In 2012, just two years before Emanuel closed the old South Shore High School, the city opened a selective-enrollment high school right across the street, called South Shore International College Preparatory High School. Now the only traditional neighborhood high schools that South Shore families can send their children to are outside of South Shore.
And then the migrants came. In May, 2023, when South Shore residents learned that the city, without seeking meaningful input from the community, planned to use the South Shore High School building as a shelter, some residents filed a complaint against the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools to prevent it from happening. The lead plaintiffs were two local activists, J. Darnell Jones and Natasha Dunn, who described the complaint as part of an effort to “save the old South Shore High School Building.” According to Dunn, the city had used South Shore for a brief period as a police training academy but had promised to return the school to the community afterward, to be used as its members saw fit. Jones and Dunn won a restraining order against the city, which, for now, is not attempting to use the school as a shelter. But Jones and Dunn’s long-term goal, Jones told me, is reopening South Shore High School: “We want our kids in our community to be able to go to school in our community.”
Then in October, 2023, the city, again without community input, announced tentative plans to move two hundred migrants into the Amundsen Park field house, in the West Side neighborhood of Austin—which is predominantly Black. The field house had already stopped offering classes and other activities for community members in order to prepare for the migrants’ arrival. New porta-potties were brought to the park, and local football teams and cheer squads were told they couldn’t practice there. When a handful of local residents learned of the city’s plans, they, too, filed a complaint against the city and won a temporary restraining order. At the end of November, the city announced that it no longer planned to use Amundsen Park as a migrant shelter. Programming at the field house has resumed.
Howard Ray, a community activist, has lived in Austin for almost three decades. He told me that, twenty years ago, almost all of his neighbors were Black, but now many families fly the flags of Latin American countries over their front porches. The influx of new migrants, he believes, will make those migrants who arrived a couple of decades earlier the new “Godfathers” of the neighborhood. “I don’t mean they’re like the Mafia,” he told me, “but they’ll benefit from the new arrivals from Bolivia, Ecuador, or Venezuela shopping in their stores, eating at their restaurants, and seeking out their advice because they share the same language and culture.” He resents that the city has used tax money to help migrants—money that could have gone to Austin and other Black communities instead. “They’re using our taxes to support and advocate for the illegal immigrants,” Ray said on Chicago morning radio earlier this year. “And in the meantime we’re getting pushed out.”
Many Black residents in Austin, South Shore, and Woodlawn say they have nothing against the migrants. Instead, they direct their ire toward Governor Abbott; Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson; and the federal government, for failing to come up with a solution. Roman Morrow, an Austin resident who was one of the plaintiffs in the case against the city to prevent it from using the Amundsen Park field house, calls the Republicans sending migrants to liberal cities “racist DeSantis and his homeboy Governor Abbott.” He told me, “It’s not like the Black community doesn’t want the migrants. The Black community is saying, ‘Don’t jeopardize our resources for something we never agreed to.’ ”
Aimee Hilado, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, and chair of the Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health, has worked with frontline staff on helping migrants feel settled in communities, including Austin, South Shore, and Woodlawn. Before they arrived in the United States, these migrants had already endured a hard journey, Hilado told me. “They witnessed so much loss of life. They take pictures of people that are floating in the rivers, and they see people that can’t make it or who will die by suicide on the path to come to the United States.” When they arrived in the U.S., she continued, “some were told that, if you come to Chicago, you’re going to get immigration status, you’re going to get a job and housing. And then they realize they don’t have a clear pathway to citizenship. They don’t have a clear pathway to employer authorization. And then they’re told in the shelters that there’s a sixty-day stay limit.”
After months of delaying eviction, Mayor Johnson’s administration recently began removing migrants from shelters. Johnson said in a statement that he was “committed to compassion” and noted that the city would hear requests for exemptions on a case-by-case basis that could allow some migrants to stay. But the over-all goal, he said, was to encourage resettlement and a “pathway to stability and self-sufficiency.” The result, Hilado said, is an extremely tough situation that could become worse. She said migrants have told her, “ ‘It was already such a hard decision to leave my home country and my support system. I witnessed and experienced what I did en route, and then I come here, and what I thought was going to be a safe refuge is not.’ And that is a hard, heavy weight to carry.” This and other compounding factors have led to a severe mental-health crisis, instances of domestic abuse, and harsh parenting, she told me. “When you can’t get angry at a government,” Hilado said, “you’re going to hit the targets that are easiest and closest to you.”
Still, according to Hilado, many migrants tell her that “there is less of an environment of welcome in Latinx communities, where you’d think it would be the opposite.” She said there has been a lot of attention paid to Black communities in Woodlawn and South Shore saying, “We don’t want this in our back yard.” “And yet,” she told me, “when you talk to some of the migrants, they will talk about how the African American communities are more welcoming.”
Dairí Liliana Granadillo, a migrant from Colombia, had a difficult time getting to the city—and a hard time settling in. Granadillo is an Indigenous Wayuu woman who said she experienced discrimination in Colombia, and got kicked out of school because her parents couldn’t afford to buy her a uniform or books. Before she made it to Chicago, she spent several years in Panama and Venezuela, working in restaurants, factories, and in family homes as a domestic. She does similar work in Chicago, though her employment has been insecure. Still, she has managed to leave a shelter and is now renting an apartment on the South Side. She has started taking English classes at Pastor Phelps’s church and hopes that someday her children, who remain in Colombia with her ex-husband, can join her in the U.S.
The residents of Woodlawn haven’t filed lawsuits against the city like the residents of Austin and South Shore did. But, Phelps told me, “I don’t think we’re at a ‘kumbaya’ moment, either. I also don’t think that all is well. Some people are still hurt. They’ve been hurt by the city’s actions, and hurt by the presence of migrants. They’re electing to be silent for a moment, but at any time it could go the other way. All it would take is an incident.”
Phelps and his church have been the targets of attacks by members of the Woodlawn community and even by members of his own congregation. They protest outside his church and call him an “Uncle Julio” for his efforts to help migrants. He said one of the regular attendees told him, “You know, Pastor, you did us exactly the same way the City of Chicago did the Black community. You just brought it into our church.” Phelps told me, “I said to this person, ‘So when have you asked me for help and I wasn’t there?’ She couldn’t say that I wasn’t.”
The pastor’s sermons don’t address the politics of the migrant situation directly. It would be a “misuse of the pulpit,” he said, if churchgoers felt like he were trying to indoctrinate them. Instead, he tries to deliver sermons for his African American congregants that acknowledge their hurt, and sermons for Latin American migrants that fill them with a sense of hope. He said he had recently delivered a sermon that spoke to both groups. He titled it “The Benefits of Waiting” and quoted Isaiah 40:31: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Explaining his meaning, he told me, “I think that all of us—regardless of our color, economic, or educational status—are waiting for something to come through.” ♦