Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has refused to disclose where millions of taxpayer dollars intended to house the city’s growing migrant population are going after an investigation found it was shelling out almost $1 million each week on just three shelters.
The state of Illinois set up a webpage designed to improve transparency during the migrant crisis, but Chicago city officials have still not disclosed exactly how much it is spending on each of its 27 shelters, according to NBC Chicago.
“I think it’s a bit more translucent than transparent,” Alderman Andre Vasquez said of city officials’ disclosure of funds.
“You get some information, but not the full picture,” he told the local news station.
In fact, when NBC Chicago reporters pressed city officials for documents related to the expenses at each shelter, they provided all of the requested information for just one-third of the migrant shelters, the outlet said.
The data turned over shows that at least one of the city’s former hotels was getting more than $344,000 each week to house 1,500 migrants, NBC Chicago found.
The city’s largest shelter in the Pilsen neighborhood, meanwhile, cost city taxpayers $38,000 for just one night, according to the news station.
That equates to $280,000 each week and more than $2.5 million over three months.
Over a similar three-month period, a shelter in Ogden that houses 1,000 migrants, cost taxpayers $1.8 million.
The city has also spent more than $200 million on Favorite Health Care Staffing, a Kansas-based company, and another $45 million on Equitable Social Solutions to identify potential shelter locations.
But those might not even be the full amounts, as Chicago hires out-of-state private companies to staff the shelters — which do not have to report their earnings, according to NBC Chicago.
When asked about the lack of transparency, Johnson just thanked reporters for the question and claimed “We are meeting you right where you are.”
Vasquez said he is now looking into getting “more mandated reporting from the government.”
Meanwhile in New York, taxpayers were shelled out $387 every day in February to put up a single migrant family.
That figure was down $5 from a peak in October 2023, when there were about 65,400 migrants in city care. The cumulative average began to steadily decline ever since, hitting $391 in November, $390 in December and $388 in January.
