The yellow school buses started arriving late Friday morning at the Lakeshore Hotel in Kenwood, filled with asylum-seekers and their families.
Many of them had been moved from police stations where they had been living in the lobbies and on the front lawns.
City officials say as many as 300 migrants could eventually be housed here. The migrants are among the more than 2,000 new arrivals who are still awaiting placement.
Another 500 migrants could be possibly be housed at an empty United States Marine Corps facility in Chicago's North Park neighborhood.
Still, neighbors of the Kenwood hotel are wary. “This is serious, said Doris Lewis. “I don’t feel safe anymore.”
Many of those raising their voices live at the Newport Condominiums, across 49th Street from the hotel, who say this is the second time it has been used to house migrants after being given little warning that it would happen again.
“They are peeing up against our property and our grass,” said Newport Resident Sharon Brown. “It’s not the youth who have taken over, it’s the immigrants who have taken over.”
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Pastor Tony Brown of the South Shore Community Church said the city’s unhoused and other under privileged populations should not be passed over in favor of the new arrivals.
“It’s not right to displace one group of disenfranchised people with a group of people from another country who definitely need the help,” he said. His church is planning a job fair in coming weeks and hopes to help both migrants and the underserved.
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