(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – With winter arriving, Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday announced a multi-million-dollar effort to help the city of Chicago deal with a continuing influx of migrants from the US Southern Border.
Pritzker said he has directed the Illinois Department of Human Services to spend $160 million on the migrant crisis.
Specifically, he said, the money will be used to ease the “bottlenecks” in which new arrivals find themselves stuck in subpar shelters, like police station lobbies, in tents and at Chicago airports, while awaiting more substantive help in resettling.
“In hard moments, it might be easier to look away – to not make the tough calls,” Pritzker said. “But when families come thousands of miles to seek refuge from terrible circumstances, who are we, as human beings, if we can’t provide at least temporary refuge?”
Chicago, a self-declared “Sanctuary City,” has been overwhelmed with tens of thousands of migrants for more than a year. Republican governors have made a political point of sending busloads of asylum seekers to liberal-leaning cities as a way to criticize the Biden Administration on its handling of the border. Many of the migrants are from Venezuela.
Pritzker’s announcement comes as Mayor Brandon Johnson has told state and county governments he expects their financial assistance in handling the problem. Federal help has not materialized.
The state funds will be used for an intake center, wraparound social services for migrants and a "winterized soft shelter site" that can accommodate up to 2,000 people for six months, the governor's office said.
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