The mayor of the ultra-liberal, near-north Chicago suburb of Evanston wants to apply for a slice of a $20 million county grant to turn an abandoned office building in his city into a new migrant shelter in a bid to help take migrants off the hands of officials in Chicago.
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss (D) announced his intention to apply to Cook County’s recently created $100 million-dollar “disaster response and recovery” fund, of which $20 million is set aside for migrants, to help him rehab an empty office building near Church Street and Oak Avenue. Biss wants to turn the building into a new migrant transition center and shelter that could house more than 60 illegal border crossers, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The county fund was created in November 2023 to encourage suburbs to step in and offer their jurisdictions to the migrant housing game that is causing the City of Chicago to shell out hundreds of millions of tax dollars.