ELBURN (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - The Village of Elburn received its first bus of migrants from Texas Thursday. It joins a growing list of suburban communities seeing migrants dropped off short of Chicago.
They showed up at the Metra station in Elburn. Some of the 38 migrants had train tickets. Several were picked up at the station.
Elburn Village President Jeffrey Walter said there will be a special meeting of the Village Board next week to discuss options.
“We basically have one bus stop in Elburn, and that’s at the train station, Walter said. We could permit the use of that one bus stop…The Board will have to decide if that’s the way they want to go…That’s how most of the other towns have done their ordinances. It’s just a permitting thing where they have to apply to use the bus stop, and that seems to be forcing them further west, I guess. If we do that, do we have a situation like they had the other night in Peotone, where at 3 o’clock in the morning there's 40 people walking down the street?”
The bus companies are stopping short of Chicago to avoid possibly having the buses impounded.
“Chicago started it with their ordinance to change it. Now, a lot of the other suburban cities, towns have done it as well. There’s a long list of them now. I think everybody on a train line that has the potential of having a bus show up is trying to figure out how to deal with it,” Walter said.
Elburn is at the end of the Metra Union Pacific West Line.
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