After two buses with Texas license plates dropped off more than 80 migrants at the Wilmette train station Wednesday evening, the passengers who had traveled across countries to get to the U.S. didn’t know where they were. It was icy and raining.
“What can we expect? Where are we going? Will there be shelter there?” they asked from the platform.
After a lull at the beginning of this year, the number of buses bringing migrants to Chicago is back on the rise as border crossings have increased. Experts who work at the border say migration numbers typically pick up in the spring and summer.
For the past three months, buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who has made it pointed policy to send migrants crossing his state’s border to sanctuary cities around the country — have brought people to the suburbs to avoid city fines for unannounced drop-offs.
Though the number of buses coming to Chicago has slowed from a peak in late December, the new steady stream of migrants poses challenges. City officials who promised to shelter and feed asylum-seekers nearly two years ago are struggling to provide housing and wraparound support for over 38,000 migrants who have passed through. Suburbs are feeling the effects of Chicago’s stressed city infrastructure.
While most migrants dropped off in the suburbs immediately board Metra trains bound for downtown, the unannounced arrivals have spurred a wave of municipalities to pass ordinances restricting bus drop-offs.
The ordinances vary. Grundy County, for example, declared itself a “nonsanctuary county for immigration.” But most counties passed regulations requiring more coordination and communication to avoid buses coming in the middle of the night.
Wilmette, however, has adopted a more welcoming posture. Volunteers coordinate with Wilmette police to meet migrants on the train platform at a moment’s notice and hand them care packages with coats, toiletries and essential items.
Michael Clark, deputy chief of services for the Wilmette Police Department, said the village received 26 buses in March, up from six in February. Six buses arrived between March 29 and 31 alone, he said. Each bus typically has 40-45 people on it.
Volunteers in Wilmette believe Abbott continues to send migrants to the village because of its openness to accept and help them. The buses that arrived last weekend were the biggest wave they’d seen.
Volunteer Deborah Morris organizes care packages and donated clothing for migrants in the basement of St John’s Lutheran Church, April 1, 2024, in Wilmette. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Unpredictability
A little before 6 p.m. in Wilmette Wednesday, a bus dropped off a group of mostly young single men at the train station. The migrants said they’d recently been released from a detention center in El Paso, Texas.
To stay warm, they wrapped themselves in thin white blankets they received in Texas. The blankets were the same as those the migrants who arrived in Glen Ellyn in January had used.
A few of the men in Wilmette said they had family to stay with in the city; others said they hoped to get tickets to other cities and states. Most said they had no relatives, and that they were hoping to find beds within the shelter system in Chicago.
Wendy Fessler, 60, hands out clothing to migrants as they board a Metra train to Chicago after traveling by bus from El Paso, Texas, April 3, 2024, in Wilmette. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Luis Polanco, 21, from the western state of Zulia, Venezuela, shivered as he waited for the Metra. He said he planned to meet up with his aunt in Tennessee.
“I don’t know anything about that state,” he said. “I just know that I have to go there.”
No one was there to greet the men, who boarded the Metra train that left for Chicago. The volunteers who make up the unofficial migrant welcoming committee don’t know when buses will arrive.
“It’s hard, because it’s unpredictable,” said longtime Wilmette resident Deborah Morris.
Earlier this week, in the basement of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Wilmette, Morris and fellow volunteer Heather Oliver sorted trash bags of donations for migrants to prepare for bus drop-offs.
The women partner with SaLT or “Service and Learning Together,” a student-driven nonprofit organization based in Highland Park that has organized donation drives with local churches and schools to help prepare care packages for migrants boarding trains in Wilmette.
Migrants wait for a Chicago-bound train at a Metra station after traveling by bus from El Paso, Texas, April 3, 2024, in Wilmette. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Morris and Oliver both have other jobs and they question how long they can keep up their ongoing response. They said they met with police and other volunteers this week to discuss the village’s long-term plan.
“As the number of bus drop-offs has increased significantly over the past several weeks, we are carefully and thoughtfully evaluating the impacts this has on our police department’s resource allocation,” Michael Braiman, Wilmette village manager, said in a statement.
While Morris and Oliver missed the first bus of migrants on Wednesday, Wilmette police tipped the volunteers off about a second bus expected to arrive. They drove to the station and pulled out their care packages, which they keep in a trailer in the parking lot. The wind and sleet whipped into their faces as they spread out coats, food and supplies on the platform.
A little after 7 p.m., a large charter bus pulled into the parking lot minutes before a southbound Metra arrived. Families with kids ran through the station from the bus and grabbed what they could — gloves, hats, lotion, jerky sticks. In their frantic dash, they almost missed the train.
“Hey, let’s go!” said a Metra employee to hurry the group along.
After the migrants left the station, Morris said it was one of the most frenetic distributions of donations they’d ever done.
The train
While riding a Metra train, Jean Carlos, 40, puts a donated jacket on his daughter, Sofía Zambrano, 8, after traveling from El Paso, Texas, April 3, 2024, in Wilmette. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Inside the brightly lit passenger car barreling toward Chicago, Stefania Rengifo, 23, smiled. She was starving and exhausted but knew she was near the end of her journey. The Venezuelan native had traveled for more than a year with her husband, Leonardo Ruiz, 26, and two daughters under the age of 10.
The family said they hadn’t eaten in hours. They hadn’t been given food on the bus and they had no money. Like many recent arrivals, they knew no one in the United States. Rengifo looked at her daughters — 6-year-old Lismar and 7-year-old Leannysmar — wrapped in layers of donated sweaters.
“We want them to study. They’ve never been to school,” she said.
Leannysmar Ruiz, 7, from right, and her sister, Lismar Ruiz, 6, try to see their breath while walking with other migrants after riding a Metra train from Wilmette to Chicago’s Ogilvie Transportation Center, April 3, 2024, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
Rengifo studied nursing in Venezuela and her husband worked at a grocery store. They decided to flee the country after her dad was shot and killed about two years ago. She wanted to go to Detroit, she said, because her 2025 asylum court date was there.
“I’ve heard that there are a lot of migrants in Chicago and not very much work. It’s complicated,” she said.
As state funds for rental assistance and costly contracts to care for migrants in shelters are reaching their limits, Chicago officials have said they will no longer guarantee they’ll help house asylum-seekers.
Just under 10,000 migrants are staying in 21 shelters across the city, down from 28 shelters in early February. Officials closed two shelters Sunday.
Professor Justin Marlowe of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy said in a recent interview that it would take more than just funds to respond to the mass number of people who continue to arrive on buses from the southern border. Marlowe said ideally the city would invest in building up more infrastructure.
“Dealing with asylum-seekers on this scale, at this pace is not something that cities are designed to do,” he said.
After riding a Metra train from Wilmette to Chicago’s Ogilvie Transportation Center, migrants follow Metra officials to the exit on April 3, 2024. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
The Metra train carrying migrant families pulled into the Ogilvie Transportation Center.
“Chicago, Chicago, llegamos a Chicago! Chicago, Chicago, we’ve arrived in Chicago!” a little boy shouted on the platform.
Migrants were given a map by Metra police with instructions in Spanish for how to walk several blocks to the “intake center” at 800 S. Desplaines St. The families walked through downtown, covering themselves in blankets.
Lismar and Leannysmar looked up at the sky to watch their breath. They held each other’s hands. They had traveled for more than a year and walked for miles to get here.
The lights from warming buses in the parking lot in the West Loop appeared in the distance.
Leonardo Ruiz, 26, and his wife, Stefania Rengifo, 23, and their daughters Leannysmar Ruiz, 7, and Lismar Ruiz, 6, all from Venezuela, walk to Chicago’s migrant landing zone on April 3, 2024, after riding a Metra train from Wilmette and a bus from Texas. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
After taking a train to the city, officials at the intake center tell migrants that shelter capacity is limited, according to a document of talking points for asylum-seekers received by the Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“There may be a waiting period before you can enter shelter. You may be waiting on a warming bus until shelter placement is available,” officials will tell migrants.
They also tell them there is no longer housing assistance available, according to the document. And if there is shelter space available, they’re told they can only stay for 60 days.
The following morning, Rengifo said her family was still on the warming bus. They’d been given milk and cereal but didn’t have tennis shoes, she said.
The only help they’d received in Illinois, they said, were the bags they received from the pile offered to them by the Wilmette volunteers as they ran to the Metra train.
Chicago Tribune’s Dan Petrella contributed.
