The Grace Episcopal Church is ending its migrant shelter program March 15, but no one knows where the men staying there will go.
At the Feb. 13 village board meeting, Linda Francis, a member of Grace’s asylum task force, gave a public comment in which she expressed concerns about the village’s support provided for Black and brown men at Grace.
“This responsibility at Grace has fallen largely on our pastor and has stretched our limit as a congregation,” Francis said at the meeting. “We at Grace initially felt abandoned.”
Women and families had been prioritized in the migrant response efforts, she said, over the men. But many of those men have families who just may not be with them at this time, Francis said.
Trustee Cory Wesley said he was sensitive to the points Francis made about families being separated, particularly Black men.
“It’s the inequity of the response that always gets me in this situation,” he said. “There is always someone being left out.”
In an email, Wesley said the government should not “create programs that create inequity.” Other board members, including trustee Brian Straw and village president Vicki Scaman, echoed their desire for the men at Grace to be supported in resettlement.
The men at Grace have been part of the village’s program since the beginning, according to Lisa Shelley, deputy village manager, but each site operates differently. At the Feb. 13 board meeting, Shelley suggested the village allocate a specific portion of funding for migrants at Grace.
Rev. John Rumple at Grace said the village originally asked the church to be an emergency shelter for migrants at the end of October. But that emergency aid was extended into a “full blown shelter,” Rumple said, with less resources than the other temporary shelters.
“These men have been at bottom of totem pole in terms of services,” he said.
Grace only has village funding for food and resources available until March 15, Rumple said, prompting the end of their shelter. Shelley said the village does not have a specific cost estimate for each site, but Grace received food delivery, security, case management from Housing Forward and legal services.
There’s no concrete plan for where the men will go, but Rumple said he hopes the village will help.
“They’ve been in shelters, both here, in Chicago, and elsewhere where they’ve been abused and some of them are like ‘I’d rather go back to the street than go into another shelter,’” he said. “This was the first time that they felt safe.”
The Oak Park Resettlement Task Force, sponsored by the Community of Congregations, has been working to help resettle many migrants in the village. They reached out to Grace, too, Rumple said.
The church is housing 25 men as of Feb. 29, Rumple said, about 13 of which are from the village’s original group. Many of the men have been split from their families, he said, echoing Francis’ public comment.
“They were sent here by their families, commissioned, really, to try to create a better future,” Rumple said. “I’ve seen them getting jobs, and they just send that money immediately back to their wives and children. They’re burdened by what is going on back home.”
If the village were to provide additional shelter for those men from the original group, the rest would still need to find a place to go, whether that be moving to another city or finding a friend or family member to stay with, Rumple said.
He said he hopes the task force could help the men find local housing because some of them have local jobs that would be hard to maintain if they were to move.
“If we do have men here who haven’t found a place to stay, then they’re going to have to be taken downtown to a landing platform and just basically start again,” he said.
The men have jobs in factories, cleaning houses, doing outside work and construction, Rumple said. Some were previously chefs, fisherman and even a criminologist but it’s hard for them to step back into their work without work permits.
The church has also been working to provide access to health clinics and case workers, to provide meals and showers, and to help the migrants establish temporary protected status or asylum, Rumple said.
“I feel really proud of the congregation’s compassion, and their display of wanting to help these men,” he said. “We’ve been grateful for response of this community.”
But the men staying at Grace are stressed about not having a concrete plan, Rumple said in a follow-up email, and he does not want to see them end up on the streets. He’s encouraged members of the parish to consider housing them, he said.
