President Joe Biden’s decision Thursday to resume deportation flights of Venezuelans raised concerns among immigration advocates Friday, even as details of the policy shift remained murky.
It was not immediately clear how the deportation flights, which Biden officials said would resume within days, would affect the migrant population in Chicago and Illinois, state and city officials said. But the state expects the policy to reduce the number of Venezuelans arriving at the southwest US border, said Alex Gough, a spokesman for Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
For people who are found ineligible for asylum, “it could mean a higher number of them being processed for deportation,” Gough said.
Meanwhile, Mayor Brandon Johnson on Friday continued his public calls for the state and federal governments to increase aid to Chicago for the humanitarian crisis surrounding the city’s growing migrant population, saying Springfield must make “sacrifices” to support the city’s response to asylum seekers.
Johnson’s comments came a day after he met with Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch in his City Hall office to discuss the state’s autumn veto session, and after Pritzker showed lukewarm interest in sending more big pots of money to Chicago for its thousands of asylum seekers.
“I’m going to continue to have conversations to make sure that the sacrifices that are being made are shared fairly,” Johnson said when asked if it’s time for state lawmakers to trim fat elsewhere in the budget to afford more migrant grants for Chicago.
Pritzker on Thursday appeared to close the door on any more state money for migrant aid from state lawmakers, who meet later this month and next for their autumn veto session.
“It’s not like we’re coming in with huge surpluses,” Pritzker told reporters. “This is not something where we have hundreds of millions of dollars to support.”
The mayor did not answer whether Welch had signalled approval for his request for additional funding, but said he had told the speaker, as well as the governor and the White House, that they needed to help ease the city’s burden of caring for the more than 17,000 migrants who have arrived in Chicago from the US southern border since August 2022.
Johnson’s deputy chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, a former state senator, also said this week that Springfield should consider cutting some of the state’s existing funding for migrant grants to the city.
“The people of Chicago, we’re being asked, and frankly tasked, with carrying the vast majority of this responsibility,” Johnson said. “I know that the leadership and the state of Illinois recognises the importance of Chicago. And the only thing I can do is do my part. And I’m asking other people to do their part.
Still, the mayor nodded to the growing impatience expressed by Chicagoans, claiming: “I know we’re going to get to the other side of this.
He also suggested he was not worried about the race to implement his plan to move migrants sleeping on the floors of Chicago police stations and airports into winterised base camps before temperatures drop.
“I know the city of Chicago has been incredibly patient with my administration. Everybody knows that. It’s not like I’m calling relatives from another country and saying, ‘You want to come live with me? Our people know that,” Johnson said.
Although Biden’s decision on Thursday to resume deportation flights of Venezuelans alarmed immigration advocates and some of Johnson’s allies, the mayor himself chose not to criticise the White House. The federal government had stopped deporting people to Venezuela because it had severed ties with the South American country’s government.
“The sanctions that are causing the turmoil, of course, are being brought to us by the right-wing extremists in this country,” Johnson said, referring to former President Donald Trump’s oil sanctions against Venezuela. “The real disconnect is the fact that you have global population shifts that have been propagated by the very failures of Republican entities that want to score political points by attacking major cities where black and brown people live.”
Last month, the Biden administration announced it would grant Temporary Protected Status, or protection from deportation if conditions in their home country prevent their safe return, to Venezuelans who arrive in the US between March 2021 and July 31 this year.
Immigration advocates on Friday questioned Biden’s decision to simultaneously grant protected status to nearly 500,000 Venezuelans in the United States and now resume deportations for others.
Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said he was concerned about the Biden administration’s response. “It’s been contradictory,” by first announcing the extension of TPS and then resuming deportations to Venezuela, he said.
Tsao said the coalition of pro-immigrant organisations is still assessing and trying to understand the announcement and how it could affect migrants already in Chicago.
The Department of Homeland Security has not provided details on how it will carry out the deportations or whether they will be focused solely on the border.
Maria Salgado, an accredited representative of the U.S. Department of Justice who works in the legal department at Centro Romero, said that migrants who entered the U.S. after 31 July “could fall into the undocumented population, which puts them at risk of deportation.
If these people had deportation orders and missed their court dates or didn’t follow through with their cases, or had deportation orders, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can find and deport them, even if they live in a sanctuary state, Salgado said.
Immigration lawyer Salvador Cicero predicted the policy would not affect people who come to the US with valid asylum claims, such as political persecution. But it is likely to affect “economic migrants” who move to the US in the hope of finding better jobs, he said.
“The people who don’t have any kind of (asylum) claim, they’re just going to be deported now,” Cicero said, adding that prosecutors and judges will still have discretion. “I think those people will probably be sent back a lot sooner than they would have expected.”
The policy will also allow the federal government to deport some Venezuelans who commit crimes while living in the US, Cicero said.
Illinois law enforcement agencies are not allowed to hold people solely on civil immigration warrants or arrest them based on their immigration status, said Gough, Pritzker’s spokesman. He deferred to federal authorities to clarify the policy’s implications. A White House spokesman did not respond to calls and emails seeking an explanation of the policy’s impact on Friday.
“This is why no one trusts immigration policy, because it’s so arbitrary, it has no basis,” said Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a refugee shelter in El Paso, Texas. “Two weeks ago they said the Venezuelans were in danger, and now they’re no longer in danger and they can go home.”
On Friday afternoon, a group of migrants living at a police station on the Near South Side gathered to try to make sense of the news.
“But where are we going to find a lawyer?” one woman asked.
