Photo: Kathy McGourty helps a mother fill out a rent check through the family liaison program for new arrivals at Old St. Patrick's Church in Chicago (Photo Courtesy of Kathy McGourty)
Thousands of migrants have slept in police station floors in Chicago over the past year. They arrived on buses, seeking asylum.
“It’s like the border has moved here,” said Sister Jessi Beck, a Sister of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary who lives on Chicago’s South Side.
Since August 2022, Chicago has received nearly 40,000 migrants, when Governor Greg Abbott began busing migrants and asylum seekers from Texas to the sanctuary cities of Chicago and New York City. Nearly 900 buses carrying migrants have arrived in Chicago since August 2022, and more than 4,700 migrants have arrived on daily flights to O’Hare and Midway since July 2023.
The number of daily arrivals began increasing in May 2023, when the COVID-19 pandemic measures preventing asylum-seekers from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border expired. Under both U.S. and international law, asylum seekers are allowed entry into the United States while their asylum cases are processed.
In response to the influx of asylum-seekers in Chicago, dozens of mutual aid groups have been organized. These communities provide migrant families with food, shelter, showers, and medical care. Women have often been leaders of these efforts and worked countless hours to meet each new family’s needs. Some mutual aid groups have involved churches: 19th District Mutual Aid on Chicago’s North Side partners with St. Mary of the Lake Catholic Church. In the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, two women lead a migrant ministry that a coalition of parishes launched in September 2022. They provide families with free housing, host meals, and offer English as a Second Language classes.
FCNews spoke with two of the Catholic women whose faith has inspired them to help recent arrivals.
Sister Jessi Beck
Sister Beck teaches at Our Lady of Tepeyac school in Pilsen, a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chicago. Last summer, Sister Beck started volunteering at Todo Para Todos, a mutual aid group that formed in Pilsen to help migrants arriving in Chicago without food, water or shelter.
Todo Para Todos, Spanish for “Everything for Everyone,” operated a home for migrants and asylum seekers from May through September 2023 and was completely volunteer-run. At its height, there were 260 residents living in the converted Pilsen warehouse. Todo Para Todos partnered with other organizations to provide medical care, immigration legal aid, and more. “So many things were happening—community members donated bikes and taught kids how to repair bikes, somebody did a soccer club with the kids,” Sister Beck said.
Sister Beck, 43, tapped in where she could by responding to mutual aid group WhatsApp messages asking neighbors to go to the police station for various reasons, such as “picking up the blankets from the police station lobby when folks got placed [into housing], and taking them to the laundromat to wash them so the next group of people would have them,” Sister Beck said in an. interview with FCNews. Neighbors also brought food, clothes, and other supplies to police stations where asylum seekers were sleeping on the station floors before they were assigned a bed in Chicago’s homeless shelter system.
In 2017, Sister Beck volunteered at Annunciation House, a volunteer-run organization that operates several shelters in El Paso, housing immigrants and refugees and helping them obtain food, housing and other assistance. In February, the Texas attorney general filed a lawsuit against Annunciation House in an attempt to shut down the nonprofit, but an El Paso judge blocked it.
In El Paso, Sister Beck was welcoming people who had come right out of immigration detention centers. The volunteers at Annunciation House would give them something to eat and offer showers and a place to sleep for the night.
“In some ways in Chicago, it’s been a similar kind of work [as in El Paso], just trying to provide basic human needs and welcome to people who are fleeing for their lives, who have lived through traumatic experiences on the journey,” she said.
For Sister Beck, “life as a sister is based on living the gospel and doing that in community with others,” she said, and working with mutual aid groups and volunteering at Todo Para Todos was part of that. “Our community came to the U.S. originally to minister to immigrants, so we have a long history with ministry with migrants.”
The challenge now, she said, is that there is a lack of affordable housing and the chances of asylum cases being won are “very small.”
“The whole system is set up for people to fail; it’s set up not to welcome people,” Sister Beck said. She knows an asylum seeker who never received the date of their court hearing for their asylum case but was immediately deported when they failed to attend the court date they had never known about.
Of the asylum decisions made in U.S. immigration courts in 2021, only 35 percent were granted refuge, and this number can be higher depending on where the case is heard, such as Houston, Texas, which has a 90 percent denial rate. The asylum process can often take years to conclude.
“I think there are smart people in this country and this could be figured out, but there is an unwillingness to do that with the people who have the most direct power to do it for various political reasons,” she said.
Supporting and advocating for migrants “feels like a basic call of the Gospel,” Sister Beck said. “What was Jesus always doing? Welcoming the stranger, feeding people. It’s like Matthew 25: When did I see you hungry or naked or imprisoned or in need?”
Sister Beck said she is grateful for the “hodgepodge of people who care, who are trying to provide the necessities of life with dignity to people.”
“I’m inspired by the collective of neighbors, people of faith and people who have maybe been hurt by institutions or religion—everyone is contributing to this experience of welcoming our new neighbors to Chicago,” Sister Beck said. “It’s that shared humanity.”
Kathy McGourty
One of the families that was living at Todo Para Todos got connected to Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Chicago’s West Loop, where Kathy McGourty and other volunteers have supported migrant families as they transition to permanent housing.
McGourty, 64, has been involved in the immigrant ministry of the archdiocese since 2005. Last July, when she saw how many migrants were arriving in the city who needed help, she stepped up to be co-chair of the parish’s Immigrant and Refugee Ministry, and then became chair that January.
McGourty sees their work as essential because of the limits of Chicago’s shelter system. “This project of supporting migrants is very necessary because if you can get families out of the shelter, then there’s room in the shelter for others to go in,” McGourty said in an interview with FCNews.
Right now, Old St. Patrick’s is supporting six Venezuelan families, housed in apartments in the Pilsen, Oak Park and Lincoln Park neighborhoods of Chicago.
According to the United Nations, 7.7 million Venezuelans have emigrated since 2015, fleeing political turmoil, violence and economic collapse which has also led to shortages of food, medicine and electricity. Many of them have traversed the Darién Gap, a dangerous stretch through the jungle between Colombia and Panama, to get to the U.S.-Mexico border.
McGourty said there are two elements to their migrant ministry at Old St. Patrick’s: the immediate needs and the sustainable needs.
Immediate needs include getting food to people without money to buy food and living in shelters where there are no cooking facilities. The migrant ministry organizes sign-ups for parishioners to bring food to families staying in hotels throughout the city.
Sustainable needs include finding stable housing and schools for children. These are addressed through Old St. Patrick’s family liaison program, where ministry members at the parish volunteer to communicate with and support the families they have been connected with, mostly through Catholic Charities.
One of the families in the program showed up at the parish’s steps. A young girl who attends the elementary school on Old St. Pat’s campus saw them and asked her parents to help them. The girl’s parents helped the family find an apartment, and McGourty and other volunteers on the ministry team subsidized the rent, furnished their apartment, and helped them move in.
McGourty is a family liaison to Gabriela and Leo, who have two boys. She helped them get registered in their Chicago school district and file for Social Security and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), an immigration program that protects vulnerable migrants from being deported back to a dangerous situation. Venezuelans are eligible for TPS for 18 months at a time, depending on when they arrived in the United States.
“It’s been a joyful journey together with [the families],” McGourty said. “Recently, Leo and Gabriela got envelopes that came with all the documentation, and it was so exciting to share that with them. We just had a baby shower for our fifth family that is expecting a baby in May, and our sixth family just got placed this month in the Pilsen area.”
McGourty has observed that the majority of those who are serving migrants in Chicago are women.
“I don't want to discount the men that [serve]; my husband helps a ton now that he is retired. But it is mostly women,” she said.
McGourty, a retired youth minister, said something she used to tell young people on confirmation retreats has stuck with her through this work with migrants.
She would ask, “‘If you got to grandma’s house for dinner and you learned that some of your cousins had to eat in the basement, how would you respond?’ Some of them said, ‘I would bring a plate down to them and make sure they had food.’ I would say, ‘That’s charity’. Some would say, ‘I would get my plate and go sit down there with them,’ and I said, ‘That’s accompaniment’. And some would say, ‘I would go find out who decided this and change that.’ And I said, ‘That’s justice’.”
“That’s what my life has been,” McGourty said. “We are all family.”
Editors Note: A previous version of this story stated that Kathy McGourty became chair of her parish's Immigrant and Refugee ministry in July. We regret the error.
