“Enough is enough … overwhelming  … disgraceful”: This is how residents of Chicago describe the Windy City’s handling of the migrant crisis overtaking the sanctuary metropolis. 

“I would just like some help,” one Chicago senior citizen pleaded during Wednesday’s public City Council meeting. The citizen said multiple government offices have failed to address the migrants who moved into her building. “I cannot live there, they play music 24 hours a day, they’re very rude, they’re very disrespectful,” she said. 

Chicago’s crisis is a symptom of the federal government’s failure to secure the border and address an influx of illegal immigrants. Cities like New York are begging for the flow of migrants to stop. Texas is in the midst of a special session to take deporting illegal immigrants into its own hands, as The New York Sun has reported. 

Since the start of President Biden’s term, the homeland security department has caught and released more than 2 million illegal immigrants. Fewer than 1 percent of them were deported, according to a House Judiciary Committee report this week. 

Officials with Democratic-led cities have blamed Texas for shipping the migrants their way. “Let me also be clear about why these buses are coming to our cities at such a rapid rate,” Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said during Wednesday’s City Council meeting. “The situation was created by right-wing extremists threatened by our values, and they’re bent on sowing chaos and division in our city.” 

When asked by the Sun if Texas will continue sending migrants north, a spokesman for Governor Abbott said it will. “Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue busing migrants to sanctuary cities like Chicago to provide much-needed relief to our overwhelmed border towns,” the spokesman, Andrew Mahaleris, tells the Sun. 

At Chicago, Mayor Johnson, whose representatives were not immediately reachable for comment, is hoping a new $16.6 billion budget will be an investment in a safer city without raising property taxes. “This is the greatest freaking city in the world,” Mr. Johnson says. “While building this budget,” he says, the city had to confront “an unprecedented, escalating wave of migration that our city has never budgeted for before.” 

Chicago can simultaneously welcome newcomers and help residents who are already living in the city, the mayor maintains. “We must meet all demands if we truly love all people. I am fully committed to doing just that in the coming months and years ahead. You elected a mayor who loves people, well done Chicago,” Mr. Johnson says of himself.

More than 400 buses of migrants have been sent to Chicago since January of this year, Mr. Johnson says, and more than 11,000 migrants are in the city’s shelters. The city’s budget deficit is higher than $500 million, and $200 million of it is a result of spending on aid for migrants.

One complaint shared at Wednesday’s meeting by several Chicago residents, especially Black residents, was that the city is taking away resources from people who are already living in the city and struggling to welcome new people instead. 

This will be made out to be about “being a sanctuary city and about being a welcoming city, and it will be said that it’s for asylum seekers, all of which is not true,” one resident said Wednesday. It’s “disgraceful,” she said, that money is “being taken from Black communities” and that “senior citizens are being displaced for immigrants.”