A Venezuelan family that illegally immigrated to the U.S. is reportedly fleeing the crime-infested streets of Chicago and returning to South America after experiencing several months of difficulties in the Windy City.
Chicago has become an undesirable location that illegal immigrants are not considering leaving the city and returning to their countries of origin, despite many being from an authoritarian country with little prospects for the future.
Michael Castejon, a 39-year-old Venezuelan father, and his family, like hundreds of other illegal immigrants in the city, have spent several nights sleeping on police station floors and in overrun shelters, the Daily Mail reported.
A city program grants illegal immigrants up to six months of rental assistance, a maximum of $15,000, which Castejon used for the allotted time while he continued to wait for a work permit. Once the city-appropriated funds ran out, however, he and his family were left to seek refuge at police stations and temporary shelters.
Eventually, Castejon found a job in construction that would pay him in cash or “under the table,” but it still “wasn’t enough to sustain his family since they arrived in June,” the Daily Mail said.
Seeing “no end in sight,” Castejon and his family decided to return to South America, telling the Chicago Tribune, “There’s nothing here for us.”
“The American Dream doesn’t exist anymore,” the migrant father said. “We didn’t know things would be this hard. I thought the process [to receive a work permit] was faster. How many more months of living in the streets will it take?” he asked. “It’s better that I leave.”
Castejon’s failed attempt to illegally relocate his family to the U.S. “had not been worth it,” the Daily Mail reported, “despite the extreme poverty and an authoritarian regime they were living under in Venezuela.”
“We just want to be home,” Castejon told the Chicago Tribune. “If we’re going to be sleeping in the streets here, we’d rather be sleeping in the streets over there.”
Since August of last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent more than 20,700 illegal immigrants from the border in his state to Chicago, a self-declared “sanctuary city.” In recent months, however, local minority residents have grown increasingly hostile towards the city’s policy, after noting that many community gathering spaces had been turned into unusable, temporary shelters, while minority residents have continued to struggle financially.
TPUSA previously reported that the Chicago officials are weighing sending illegal immigrants to Missouri to alleviate the strain on local facilities and financial resources.
