On Friday, September 29th Governor Pritzker announced Joliet Township would be receiving $8.6 million to help the Central American migrants that have been sitting in police stations, fire stations, and even O’Hare in Chicago. Joliet would accept some of these migrants and use the money provided by Springfield to take care of them until their paperwork is processed and they can legally start working. The problem is that Mayor D’arcy’s approval was on the grant application when he had never even heard that Joliet Township was seeking a grant.
Since August of last year, buses of asylum seekers have been coming to Chicago, a sanctuary city, from Texas. As of now, over 17,000 migrants have been brought to Chicago, and the city is overwhelmed with the seemingly never-ending demand for housing and public services needed for the migrants. The grants being distributed by the state are designed to help Chicago with the crisis and also alleviate some of the pressure by taking some migrants out of the city and putting them in some Chicago suburbs.
When Pritzker announced the grant recipients D’arcy and the City Council were shocked. The grant from Springfield said that the Joliet Mayor’s Office and the Joliet Fire Department had approved the application, when in fact, neither had agreed to nor been informed of the application. D’arcy said “It’s almost a fraud that they put our names on this,” when the announcement was made. The grant would bring around 1,200 migrants from Chicago into Joliet, D’arcy said such a burden would overwhelm already strained public services in Joliet.
Angel Contreras, the Joliet Township Supervisor, applied for the grant. His plan for handling the migrants was unclear, resulting in a tremendous pushback by the public. When addressing the public regarding the inclusion of the mayor and fire department’s logos on the application Contreras called it an “oversight” which enraged residents. Without cooperation with the city, there would be no place to house the migrants, but for a currently unknown reason, Contreras still applied for the grant and lied about D’arcy’s approval.
On Tuesday, October 10th Joliet Township held a board meeting to discuss regular township business. The meeting which was planned to last two hours, went nearly four hours due to the one hundred plus residents coming to the meeting to protest the migrant grant. Over two hours of people speaking to the board, with the overwhelming majority being against the grant, and very few in favor. The meeting got very rowdy with people shouting profanities and booing the board and those residents in favor of the grant.
Now the grant has officially been dropped two weeks after its announcement. The real question now is what does the future hold for Angel Contreras because reelection certainly will not come easily.