Chicago Residents Gather to Oppose New Migrant Shelter at Lake Shore Hotel

Scores of angry residents of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood gathered at an August 30 community meeting to oppose City Hall’s plans to house several hundred illegal border crossers at the Lake Shore Hotel.

The hotel had been a designated shelter in the past, but residents say that the illegals brought with them a host of problems, including loitering, noise, littering, and open drug use and dealing, according to ABC 7.

Many residents do not want a repeat of the past issues and spoke out against the plan to bring upwards of 300 migrants to the hotel this week.

During the standing-room-only meeting, resident Dora Lewis exclaimed, “I don’t want them there! Take them someplace else or send them back to Venezuela! I don’t care where they go!”

“I am absolutely livid, livid. You all are so hypocritical. I live right across the street from that hotel. Back when they were there in the spring,” Lewis added. “They would be on our lawn, on our benches. I’m walking around the building; what do I walk upon? Three men urinating on the building.”

“This is wrong. You got 73 percent of the people that are homeless in the city are Black people; what have you done for them?” Lewis added.

Hyde Park resident Cornell Tyler was careful to note that it is perfectly fine to take care of people, but one should take care of his own first.

“I don’t say anything about taking care of other people, but you take care of your own first. Don’t you? Don’t you take care of you own before you take care of somebody else?” he told ABC 7.

City officials tried to tamp down the criticism by insisting that the illegals that would be housed in the hotel would be families, some with children in need of medical care.

Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management added that the illegals are only scheduled to stay at the hotel for six months but would not commit to that as a hard deadline, adding that things could easily change, and the timeline could be extended.

Alderman Desmon Yancy of the 5th Ward said he was surprised by the plans and only found out on Wednesday about Friday’s plan to move the hundreds of migrants into the hotel.

“I found out on Wednesday [and] called the meeting immediately. I don’t know what happened before I got here,” Yancy said, according to Fox 32. “But in the spirit of transparency, this is why we’re in a room, because I felt that it was important for community members to know what was going on in their neighborhood even if the mayor’s office wasn’t willing to.”

City officials never informed the neighborhood of the plans but said they would move ahead on Friday despite what residents said at the Wednesday meeting.

Residents were also surprised when it was revealed that nearly 150 migrants had already been living in the hotel.

Not everyone spoke out against the plan. Alderman and migrant activist Andre Vasquez feels the city should pay any expense to house the illegals arriving in Chicago but criticized the states sending them northward.

He also blasted the naysayers and their opposition to the housing plans and accused them of aiding an “attack on the city of Chicago” by other states sending buses of illegals to the Windy City.

“It is an intentional attack on the city of Chicago to get us to be divided,” Vasquez exploded. “They don’t want to see a successful Democratic Party; they don’t want to see the president reelected; they want to see Chicago look like a disaster.”

Wallace Goode argues with Dora Lewis during a meeting at The Promontory in Hyde Park, Chicago, on August 30, 2023, to discuss a plan to turn the Lake Shore Hotel into a shelter for recently arrived migrants. (Trent Sprague/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Officials say that more than 13,000 border crossers have arrived in Chicago since August 2022.

Recently elected “progressive” Mayor Brandon Johnson has taken heavy criticism for stashing illegals in parks, closed school buildings, and university campus buildings.

Johnson took criticism for his migrant shelter in Wilbur Wright College on the Northwest Side, even though citizens gathered in May to protest the plans, and was blasted for designating Chicago’s Daley College as a shelter where he stashed another 400 border crossers.

Every shelter has presented a long list of problems for residents.

In July, 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly blasted City Hall for the dangerous conditions a migrant shelter had created in his downtown Ward. Reilly was incensed after the illegals Mayor Johnson stashed in a closed hotel had initiated problems, including open drug use, prostitution, human waste, and other serious issues.

Crime has risen around many of these migrant shelters throughout the city. In August, a fight broke out at a migrant shelter only blocks from some of Chicago’s famed institutions, including John Marshall Law School, Prtizker Park, and Harold Washington Library.

Migrants have also been stashed in many of Chicago’s police district headquarters buildings. But in July, several police officers were accused of sexually abusing a migrant girl and getting her pregnant in an incident, causing City Hall to claim it would stop housing illegals in police stations.

However, a recent series of photos posted to X shows that at least some police stations are still being used as shelters despite City Hall’s claim to have ended the practice.

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