Immigrants Transformed Chicago’s South Side. Trump’s Crackdown Is Pushing Them Underground.

CHICAGO — The St. James Community Church, a traditionally Black congregation on this city’s South Side, holds a family brunch on the first Sunday of each month that has attracted immigrants struggling to find their footing in the city.

The new arrivals would come by the church to share the meal and participate in Bible study, using Google Translate to communicate with parishioners, said Pastor William Hall, who’s also the city alderman representing the Chatham neighborhood, a middle class Black community known for its long blocks of single-family bungalows, family-run restaurants and mural of poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

That changed after President Donald Trump took back the White House.

“Since Trump was elected, we don’t see any of them anymore,” Hall said, adding he doesn’t know whether the migrants have moved out of the area or are in hiding. “We do know there was fear about massive deportations.”

Chicago’s South Side, renowned for its rich Black history that dates back to the Great Migration, saw an influx of new arrivals since 2022 when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started bussing thousands of border crossers to Chicago as a way to highlight — and attack — the city’s deference to immigrants. More than 5,100 migrants — mostly Venezuelans, and largely undocumented — now call Chicago home, sparking tensions among some longtime residents.

Many new arrivals found inexpensive housing on the South Side and could be easily spotted at bus stops, schools and churches, or outside of big box stores looking for work. Families doubled-up in homes that have been left vacant in recent years, a result of many of the area’s Black residents leaving the city.

But since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, raids in the city — and the specter of more far-reaching sweeps — have caused fear in the South Side’s burgeoning immigrant communities, and many new arrivals have gone virtually underground, say observers. The deportation crackdown prompted some parents to keep children home from school and adults to miss days at work. The upheaval has exacerbated the challenges faced by local officials in trying to address the needs of a population that was already difficult to help due to language and legal issues.

One new arrival, Jose, talked about the journey that took him through the jungles of Venezuela to the Texas border, where he was dispatched by Abbott to Utah before coming to Chicago. He spoke on the condition that he be identified by a pseudonym for fear of retribution since he is an undocumented immigrant.

“It is frustrating, very frustrating,” he said, speaking of the legal challenges and threat of deportation that he faces. “It is not an easy life.”

South Side Tensions

Jose was a machine operator at a food distribution company in Venezuela when he decided to leave for the United States. Through an interpreter, Jose said his older brother was running for a council seat with the area’s opposition party when he was shot dead. So he decided to move to the U.S. for safety and to earn enough money to send home to his mother, who is caring for his son.

After landing in Utah, he worked odd jobs and sought a lawyer to help him with the legal paperwork to gain citizenship. But the attorney wasn’t cheap, Jose said, so he took a bus to Chicago, which has a wider safety net for new arrivals.

“I heard that in Chicago there were organizations that help people,” he said through an interpreter with Onward Neighborhood House, a group that is helping him manage the bureaucratic maze of trying to get legal status.

After arriving at a landing zone in downtown Chicago, Jose lived in a migrant shelter for nearly a year. Then he moved into a home on the South Side with two other immigrants. He has since found a job working at a laundromat.

Jose applied for asylum but paperwork problems derailed the process. So now he is starting over with an attorney.

“One has to go through so many things to come to the United States,” he said.

Farther south in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, Timothy Thomas Jr., who is African American, says the influx of Venezuelan immigrants like Jose in recent years was striking in the predominantly Black community.

“You’d really see it around the schools. I’m retired and I’d see school drop-off and pick-up. Latino moms would walk their kids to school. And you’d look at the playground during recess and it was a melting pot,” said Thomas, who worked for a decade in the local U.S. Department of Homeland Security office.

The changing environment of his neighborhood and other Black communities on the South Side hasn’t been smooth. The city couldn’t keep up with the stream of migrants that arrived between 2022 and 2024, forcing many to sleep on police station floors before shelters were popped up. City and state officials worked to solve the problem by approving six months of free rent for some new arrivals in unoccupied homes, many of which were located on the city’s Black South Side.

It was a gesture that caused tension in a city whose population is about a third white, a third Black and a third Latino. South Side residents who have long struggled to make ends meet protested at City Council meetings.

“We did not have the luxury and opportunity to cross the border,” said a resident during one of the council’s public comment periods last year. “We came here chained in the bottom of slave ships.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has tried to navigate the tensions by taking steps to make housing opportunities equitable for all struggling residents. He often speaks about the city increasing the number of youth jobs, reopening a publicly funded mental health facility and funneling monies from a $1.25 billion bond toward housing projects on the South and West sides as examples of his commitment to longtime residents. 

These are points Johnson tried to address last week in the politically charged congressional hearing that saw him and three other big-city mayors defend sanctuary city status that prevents local law enforcement from helping federal authorities in deportations.

Tensions in Chicago have persisted, despite these efforts.

Migrants have had trouble paying rent after their six-month vouchers have run out. And some neighborhoods have seen more incidents of open-air drug use, garbage thrown out on the street or public urination, said Alderman Raymond Lopez, whose ward straddles Chicago’s Latino South West Side and the African American South Side.

“There’s frustration that they don't fit in, and I’m hearing it from Black neighbors, Latino neighbors and white neighbors,” Lopez said.

South Side pastors have found themselves navigating the tension, supporting their Black congregants angry that their needs were being ignored while being supportive of new arrivals who had little more than the clothes on their backs.

“There was empathy [for migrants] but people also pointed out that they’ve been suffering this way the whole time,” said Father David Jones of St. Benedict the African Parish in the Englewood neighborhood. His Catholic church found itself helping some migrant families who had jobs and a place to stay but little else. The parish found mattresses and clothing and prepared meals.

Then the 2024 election came and threats of deportation. By January, Jones said, Venezuelan immigrants stopped coming by.

He and others on the South Side say tensions have since subsided as migrants have acclimated more to the community. They are finding shelter, establishing themselves in the community — albeit behind closed doors — likely for fear of deportation, he said.

But other groups say they’re still seeing a steady influx of immigrants seeking assistance. Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, a community organization that’s been helping immigrant workers and other residents in Chicago since 2007, moved offices to the South Side in 2023, only coincidentally at the same time Abbott started sending immigrants to Chicago.

The group has joined in a lawsuit to prevent the Internal Revenue Service from disclosing private tax return information to immigration enforcement authorities.

“We don’t ask about their status and don’t keep track of that. But we’ve definitely seen an increase” in clients, said Ana Guajardo, the group’s executive director. “Normally we have outreach efforts; now people are coming to us.”