City Council member angered by plan for migrant shelter at Amundsen Park fieldhouse
Amundsen Park fieldhouse, 6200 W. Bloomingdale Ave.
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Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th) on Monday unleashed his anger at Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to turn the Amundsen Park fieldhouse into a shelter for 200 migrants for at least six months.
Three days after Taliaferro warned that the burgeoning migrant crisis was bringing historic tensions between Blacks and Latinos to a boil, the situation hit even closer to home.
He was told the Johnson administration plans to open a shelter at Amundsen Park fieldhouse, 6200 W. Bloomingdale Ave. in Galewood. It would be the city’s 22nd migrant shelter.
Taliaferro has scheduled a community meeting at the fieldhouse at 6 p.m. Tuesday to give his constituents an opportunity to join him in venting their frustrations.
“We can’t argue in one sentence, ‘Let’s provide opportunities for youth to get them to stop coming downtown’ and then take those opportunities away from the youth,” Taliaferro, chair of the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee, said Monday. “We can’t take these resources, especially in our under-served communities. This goes against everything that we’re trying to do to reduce violence.”
Taliaferro predicted an overflow crowd — and plenty of “screaming,” he added.
“This is just not a curveball that goes across the plate and becomes a strike. This is a curveball that actually hits the batter,” Taliaferro said.
“We’re taking away opportunities from our young people when we say we want to give them alternatives to going downtown or gathering en masse and doing the negative things that have been done.”
Taliaferro was not appeased when told Park District programming would move to Rutherford Sayre Park, 6871 W. Belden Ave.
He noted “almost all” participating seniors walk to Park District programs and that Rutherford Sayre Park, about a mile and a half to the northwest, is not within walking distance.
After being blindsided by the proposal, Taliaferro said he expressed his outrage directly to Johnson, deputy chief of staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas and Chicago Park District Superintendent Rosa Escareno.
Pacione-Zayas said top mayoral aides don’t take the decision to close the fieldhouse lightly. She pointed to the meticulous transition plan put in place before converting the Broadway Armory into a shelter.
“We were very particular about the youth programming and making sure that they were going to spaces that would not require crossing gang lines or going too far. And in fact, it actually worked out with our youth programs. Because what we ended up doing is standing them up in the high schools where the majority of the students went and added some additional capacity there in out-of-school time,” Pacione-Zayas said.
“These are all planned transitions. Are they perfect? No. Will everybody be happy? No. But, with the prospect of continued double-digit buses 24 hours-a-day, we’re in this situation. …This is unprecedented and there’s two things we don’t control: The buses in terms of number and frequency. And we don’t control what the federal government does or does not do. What we can control is making sure we don’t have people on the street en masse.”
Rich Guidice, the mayor’s chief of staff, noted five more busloads of migrant are arriving Monday after 20 more over the weekend.
“We realize we’re asking our city to take on a lot. But we’re in a bit of a situation here and we just have to continue to ask for peoples’ patience. … We realize that it does cause a disruption in peoples’ daily lives. But we’re just trying to figure out what some of the best solutions are for this humanitarian mission. And right now, Amundsen Park is just one of those facilities that fell in line for this mission,” Guidice told the Sun-Times.
“We have well over 2,500 people in our police stations at the moment. One of our priorities is to get them out of there as soon as possible. … We have some brick-and-mortar structures that are coming on board this week and next week that will, hopefully, continue to give us some more relief. And then, we’ll keep pursuing this tent contract for additional solutions as well.”
Taliaferro is one of three members of Johnson’s leadership team opposed to the mayor’s plan to create giant tent cities — through a $29.3 million contract with GardaWorld, a security firm — to get 2,246 migrants, 579 of them minors, off the floors of police stations and O’Hare and Midway airports.
Pacione-Zayas said the urgency has been exacerbated by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent plan to “ignore” the city’s 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew and send buses to Chicago around the clock. One bus arrived at 1 a.m. Saturday.
“We’ve got some pretty good understanding that he’s going to ignore all of our ... attempts to have some type of management of the situation,” Pacione-Zayas said.