Chicago’s liberal mayor, Brandon Johnson, is backpedaling on his plan to visit the southern border and will instead stay put to address the “immediate urgency” of the thousands of migrants who are overwhelming the city.

A delegation from the city will travel south, but Mr. Johnson, who was planning to go this week, says he has bigger priorities. The change of plans reflects the mayor’s desperation to find housing solutions as Chicago’s notorious winter approaches and as he faces surprise pressure from minority groups who say the migrants are taking resources and jobs from their communities. 

As northern, Democratic-led cities like Chicago and New York reel from busloads of illegal immigrants overwhelming hotels and city services, questions are emerging about whether the idea of “sanctuary cities” is in collapse.

The mayor will be working “to address the immediate urgency of adding shelter space to house thousands of new arrivals currently sleeping in police stations, airports or outside,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement provided to the Sun. 

 “With the weather growing colder and hundreds of migrants arriving each day, it is more important than ever that every stakeholder at the state, federal and local level work diligently to address this challenge, while continuing to meet the needs of Chicago and Illinois residents,” the statement added. 

The delegation, meanwhile, will travel to Texas to “review operations at federal processing centers” and discuss “ways to alleviate the financial and operations challenges in both Chicago and at the border,” Mr. Johnson says.

“The Chicago delegation will also be sharing pertinent information about extreme housing and weather conditions currently facing asylum seekers in Chicago, and the immense challenges awaiting those without verified sponsors,” he adds. 

Increasing numbers of high-profile Democrats have been asking for federal help to handle the migrant influx, including Illinois’s governor, J.B. Pritzker, who called on President Biden this month to help his state. 

Even as San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., are overwhelmed by the busloads of illegal migrants, nothing will change until politicians in sanctuary cities and the federal government support securing the border, a former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan, tells the Sun. 

The rhetoric from politicians in sanctuary cities right now is “not actually placing the blame on the Biden administration” or demanding that President Biden start enforcing the law and ending open border policies, he says. 

“The only thing that they’re asking for is for more taxpayer dollars to help them manage the crisis, rather than take some of those taxpayer dollars and use that to actually secure our border,” Mr. Morgan says. “They’re just asking for more money to manage the crisis after it’s already been here.”

The same politicians are lying by asking for more federal funds without showing the side effects of illegal immigration, which is “not a victimless crime,” he says. 

“The cartels intentionally will shove a group of illegal aliens through one area of the border, knowing that border patrol agents will respond to apprehend them,” which leads to an unmanned zone the cartels can exploit to “push drugs, criminals, and national security threats coming across our border,” Mr. Morgan says. 

“So every time you see a group of illegal aliens anywhere, just picture that drugs also came to that city and killed Americans every single day, that criminals are in that city and potential national security threats,” Mr. Morgan adds, noting that illegal immigrants in Texas alone have committed almost 490,000 crimes since 2011.

“Until we can change that narrative and wake people up and say what we should be doing is supporting legal immigration, and absolutely shutting down illegal immigration, sanctuary cities are going to continue to be alive and thrive because they see a perceived political benefit to it,” Mr. Morgan said of the politicians running cities like Chicago. 

This year alone, more than 400 buses of migrants have been sent to the Windy City, and more than 11,000 migrants are in city shelter areas. Mr. Johnson unveiled a $16.6 billion budget last week to address the city’s more than $500 million budget deficit, a large chunk of which is due to migrant aid, as the Sun has reported. 

Some Chicago residents have sued the city over using public buildings such as schools to house migrants. At a city council meeting last week, several residents said while they supported immigration, the spike in migrant arrivals was crippling Black neighborhoods.