Grievances Filed Against Chicago Emergency Shelters
When thousands of asylum seekers began arriving in Chicago in 2023, the city converted public buildings into Emergency Temporary Shelters. These sites, meant to be short-term havens, quickly became home for months at a time to families waiting for more permanent housing.
By spring 2024, the City of Chicago began publicly reporting grievances filed from inside these shelters—formal complaints about conditions, staff, supplies, safety, and policy, under SO2024-0008386.
Scroll to move through biweekly reporting periods. Data from the Chicago Data Portal .
In April 2024, the city began recording formal grievances from emergency shelters housing new arrivals.
By early May, grievances began accumulating across a few shelters, mostly around supplies and staff issues.
Mid-May brought increases at Halsted and Ogden as more residents reported policy or security concerns.
By June, larger shelters like AIC and Elston became major hubs of reported grievances.
Totals continued to rise citywide through the summer.
Some shelters have since closed. For example, Daley College shelter closed in July 2024, after operating a little over a year.
In late October, the City announced that it would end its migrant shelter system by the end of the year. Mayor Brandon Johnson announced that services would be merged with the city's homeless shelters. According to Block Club Chicago's coverage, 13 active shelters run by the city and state housed 4,996 people, with 21 awaiting placement, at the time of the story. The city would also end the 60-day eviction policy at migrant shelters. Asylum seekers still in shelters when the new system started on January 1 would still be allowed to stay. Starting on October 22, only migrants who had been in the country for 30 days or less were eligible for placement in a shelter.
On November 20th, the City announced the imminent demobilization of the New Arrivals system in a memorandum. Of the 12 then-operational New Arrival shelters, they planned to reduce the number to five—three run by the city and two by the state—and close the remaining seven by the end of the year, following their previous plan.
They also announced that there were three shelters that would “remain open and merge into the unified shelter system”: American Islamic College (AIC), Young Women’s Leadership Academy (YWLA), and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD).
Chicago ended migrant-focused assistance services at the end of the year. According to the City, 2,476 migrants were still living in six city-run shelters as of December 20, 2024.
Shelter Profiles: Grievance Composition
Each donut shows the share of grievance categories reported by that shelter.