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A controversial tent city to house migrants in Chicago will not go ahead after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker cited environmental concerns Tuesday and withdrew the state’s support for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s project to provide winter shelter for asylum seekers.
“We will not continue housing families on a site where serious environmental concerns are still present,” Pritzker said in a statement.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency concluded the camp was unsafe after a city-issued report detailed the contamination found at the former industrial site on the city’s Southwests Side and the efforts to remove it.
The decision comes barely a day after the governor’s office called for a pause in construction in the Brighton Park neighborhood, where both neighbors and environmental advocates opposed the proposal with signs that read “This land is contaminated.”
Arsenic, lead and mercury all turned up in soil samples across the site, as well as toxic compounds including pesticides and PCBs, also known as polychlorinated biphenyls, according to the nearly 800-page city report. While city officials say the majority of the contaminants have been removed from the soil, Illinois EPA officials said insufficient testing was done and state remediation standards were not met.
The tent city was built by GardaWorld Federal Services, part of the multinational private security firm that has an almost $30 million deal with the city for his services in September. GardaWorld faced investigation for his role in transporting migrants from Florida and allegations of the abuse of migrant children. In the past week, the company has lifted the metal skeleton of several of the massive tent structures, which span a city block. The full installation was scheduled to open later this month.
Grist / Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco
Since August 2022, more than 22,000 asylum seekers from countries such as Colombia, Nicaragua and Venezuela have arrived in Chicago. To date, nearly 13,000 live in shelters across the city or are housed in police stations and O’Hare International Airport.
“It’s not a surprise,” said Anthony Moser, a founding member of Neighbors for Environmental Justice, an environmental watchdog organization based on the South Side of Chicago. “That when you pick an industrial lot in the industrial corridor, and it turns out it has pollution.”
The site in Brighton Park was home to a cargo terminal, a zinc smelter, and an underground diesel storage tank. Environmental advocates are concerned about possible health problems for migrants who will be housed at the former industrial site. From the beginning, advocates like Moser said the city left the community in the dark.
“They didn’t announce when they started considering this site, they didn’t announce when they signed a contract for this site,” Moser said. “They didn’t announce when they found anything as a result of environmental testing, they didn’t announce that they were going to start construction.”
Johnson pointed to approaching winter temperatures at a press conference last week when he defended his decision to raise the Brighton Park base camp before releasing the environmental analysis to the public.
The state footed the $65 million bill to build the tent camp in Brighton Park and restore a nearby empty drugstore to shelter migrants.
Initially, the plan was to transfer 500 migrants to the newly built base camp. According to the contractthe site capacity is between 250 to 1,400, but the city intends to shelter up to 2,000 migrants there.
This story has been updated to include Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s decision to halt construction of the tent city.
