Chicagoans blast ‘hypocrite’ lawmakers over plans to house 300 migrants while ignoring ‘majority black’ homeless

Tempers flared on Wednesday as Chicago residents attended a community meeting, blasting “hypocrite” lawmakers for planning to house 300 illegal immigrants as local homeless people are forced to sleep on the streets.

(Video Credit: CBS Chicago)

Chicago authorities plan on converting a hotel in the Hyde Park district into a shelter to house the migrants. Locals are furious over it and voiced their anger during the meeting, according to CBS News.

The Windy City has had over 11,000 illegal immigrants arrive since August 2022, according to the mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff Cristina Pacione-Zayas. That proclamation was made at the end of June and things have only gotten worse in the so-called sanctuary city due to progressive priorities.

Many of the illegal immigrants have arrived courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has bused them there from the Mexican border. Abbott has sent his reality check of approximately 30,000 illegal immigrants to Democrat-run cities including Chicago, Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Denver, and Los Angeles, in protest of President Biden’s open borders policy.

Since April, illegal immigrants have been housed in Chicago police stations as well as other city-owned buildings. The city wants to move them out of the police stations for obvious reasons.

Desmon Yancy, the alderman representing the Hyde Park district, held a meeting on Wednesday to discuss plans to convert the Chicago Lake Shore Hotel into a shelter. He told a very angry crowd that he had just learned of the proposal.

Hundreds packed the meeting and they were not happy.

“Yelling and devolving into chaos isn’t going to get us anything,” Yancy declared.

I was absolutely livid, and you guys are so hypocritical,” one woman angrily told the gathered aldermen, according to CBS News.

Another woman also spoke out for local homeless people. The overwhelming majority of them are black and are being ignored in the wake of the illegal immigrant madness.

“You’ve got 73 percent of the people homeless in this city are black people,” she informed the politicos. “What have you done for them?”

According to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, a report released in 2023 shows that there are 68,440 homeless people on the streets of the city. That’s a 4.5 percent jump over last year.

The city is contending that there are now 6,500 illegal immigrants being housed in the 16 city-run shelters. That’s space that the homeless would normally take up and winter is coming which is brutal in Chicago.

“The thing should be that they should have the community out before they decide whether or not they’re going to move them somewhere, so to me, this is just a dog and pony show,” Tyrone Muhammad, executive director of Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change, told WGN9. “Here we are again. It’s not that we don’t have a heart for the migrants. We just continue to see people go in front of the most disinvested communities.”

“Yet we have violence, we have so much disinvestment in the black community and no elected officials are really addressing those issues,” Muhammad said.

Andre Vasquez, chair of the City Council Committee on Immigrant and Refugee Rights, told the angry audience that he sympathized and understood their frustrations. Many don’t see it that way.

“I understand exactly the sentiment,” he asserted. “What I am saying to you is we’re all in the same city, so we all know that the black community hasn’t had that level of investment; hasn’t had that support. We have existing people that also need housing.”

City officials did not make themselves any more popular by informing those in attendance that some illegal immigrants had already been housed at the proposed hotel since spring. Now, they want to give all of it over to them.

“I think it’s a basic issue of notification and respect,” Emmanuel Jackson, who is a Hyde Park resident, told CBS News. “If these types of wide changes are being made in the community in which we live, we should know about them.”

“Our building is getting a new grocery store. We got public notification three months ago,” Jackson noted. “So you’re going to change an actual hotel to a shelter – and not tell anybody?”

“How do we know that these are not criminals coming into our community?” another woman said at the meeting.

“I don’t want them there,” one resident bluntly stated at the meeting, according to WGN9. “Take them someplace else or send them back.”

Families will occupy the two-level hotel, but the city would not provide a timeline for how long they will stay, according to CBS News.

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