SAFETY AND SANCTUARY BELONG TO ALL PEOPLE OF CHICAGO

chicago.anti.detention.network@protonmail.com      IG: anti.detention stopgardaworldchicago@gmail.com 

More than 20,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Chicago over the past year. Concentrated and congregate living situations for asylum-seeking families will lead to predictable harms. If Chicago is to make real the promise of welcoming immigrants, we must ground ourselves in first principles, focused on the safety of those who are coming here. We can identify and prevent predictable harms.

To understand how Chicago government is operating, we have studied government records, policies and public meetings:

Upon arrival, the Office of Emergency Management and Communications tracks the movement of asylum seekers and sorts them to a shelter system designated only for stateless peoples. 

The City tracks asylum seekers by requiring them to sign in and out with staff and uses metal detectors to screen them. Chicago Public Schools makes lists and tracks enrollment of newcomer students.

Chicago chooses destabilization through evictions. City operated shelters designated for asylees limit and criminalize the movement of asylum seekers by imposing curfews.

The choices of Chicago officials — to name, track, sort, concentrate, surveil, criminalize  — make predictable where to find immigrants in the city. Chicago’s government is making lists of undocumented people, concentrating newcomers and creating conditions that make finding asylees easy. Through their intentional policy decisions, Chicago officials put asylees into direct confrontation with Chicago police, ICE and individuals acting on xenophobic rhetoric. 

Policies of mass containment are unwelcoming, dehumanizing, and dangerous. Experimenting on asylees to build new forms of imprisonment, policing & surveillance is a direct attack on all our communities.

We support our neighbors in asserting their basic rights. This City can increase safety and protection for all of its residents instead of choosing degrees of isolation and competition for resources; measures that protect people who have newly arrived, measures that protect undocumented people who are already the fabric of the city, measures that protect people who have experienced intergenerational exploitation and weave policies of safety and sanctuary together. We express solidarity with Chicagoans who have been chronically and intentionally under-resourced, over-surveilled and excluded.

We should not have policies of containment. Through his dictate to use GardaWorld, Mayor Johnson continues to display a desire to contain, sort, concentrate, surveil and criminalize already precarious people. We renew our demand to cancel the GardaWorld contract and reject equivalent arrangements such as Heartland Alliance. As a first step toward stable and safe housing, we demand solutions that include all unhoused people in one, unified shelter system. 

We will continue to gather with asylees over shared meals and listen to their experiences of carcerality in Chicago. We will continue to make serious study of the Mayor’s Office, City Council, and city agencies and invite critical understanding of their actions. 

We are eager for affinity with others in this city — with those who stand on principle and believe in housing for all.  We look to connect with people who work to not only meet discreet needs or nurture collective spaces but will act in coordinated political solidarity with asylees and contention against the City to compel collective safety. We invite everyone to think on their positionality and to act in response to this moment. Which promises will you make to increase autonomy and safety in Chicago?