There’s been a sharp decline in the number of migrants arriving in Chicago, but things haven’t slowed down for Maureen Graves, a lawyer doing volunteer work to help them.
At first, she worked to find basic necessities for the new arrivals. Now, she’s helping them apply for asylum in the United States as many are facing a coming deadline.
“Basically, I went from food, clothes and shoes to legal work,” says Graves, whose legal practice for 30 years focused on special education.
More than 50,000 migrants, most from Venezuela, have arrived in Chicago since August 2022, many who fled violence, threats and persecution and are seeking asylum. With few exceptions, they have one year from arriving to apply to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for asylum. So those who arrived last fall now face only a limited amount of time to do so.
More than 30,000 asylum applications were filed in Chicago in the first half of 2024 — three times more than the number filed in same period in 2022.
Getting asylum is difficult. Applicants must provide proof of persecution because of gender, race, religion, political opinion or for being in a particular social group. From October 2023 to August, fewer than one-quarter of the asylum cases processed in Chicago were granted, according to USCIS data.
The benefits of getting asylum include being able to work legally and getting a path to permanent U.S. residency and citizenship.
Lisa Koop, who’s the director of legal services with the Chicago-based National Immigration Justice Center, says it’s important to make sure people qualify for asylum before filing because, “If you don’t win asylum, you can get a deportation order. It may be better for that person to not begin this process and explore other legal options or wait for changes in the law rather than use the asylum system as sort of a catchall for people.”
Koop says her organization and others have been holding clinics for people who don’t have lawyers, but the need for legal consultation and representation far exceeds what they can provide.
Brenda Delgado, a volunteer on the South Side who works to connect migrants with free legal help, says many community groups offering immigration support have been overwhelmed. Private attorneys can be expensive, with fees ranging from $2,000 to more than $8,000. And sometimes, reaching lawyers who offer free legal help from the lists that some groups have given out has been impossible.
“When I’ve tried to send people to specific places for legal help, it’s usually been pretty unsuccessful,” says Graves, who isn’t an immigration lawyer by training but, with the guidance of immigration attorneys, started her own legal clinic and helps new arrivals with the most basic part of the process: filling out applications and other paperwork. “I’m trying to get people to realize that I am not perfect and that they have to be on top of this stuff.”
Migrants seeking asylum face many challenges. Some aren’t keeping track of their filing deadline. Others have trouble finding documentation, including ID cards and birth certificates they might have lost in making the trek through jungles and multiple countries. And people sometimes don’t have clear information about their hearings or understand how to find out.
Arianny, a migrant who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used out of fear that her application might be negatively affected, says she, her husband and three children came to Chicago from Venezuela. They lived in a small town where her husband was a fisherman, but she says criminal groups began demanding protection money from her husband. They tried to stay in Venezuela, but, after repeatedly being threatened and extorted, left.
She says the U.S. asylum application was very long and hard to understand. She and her husband had to gather evidence, including pictures of the life they left behind, and to ask people in Venezuela who witnessed the threats to write letters.
When people are represented by lawyers with well-prepared cases, experts say, the odds of getting asylum or being allowed to legally stay in the country are much higher.
With help from Graves, Arianny recently filed her family’s application for asylum. Now, they wait.
Which could take years, Koop says.
“In Chicago, the vast, vast, vast majority of those Venezuelan asylum cases or the cases of anybody who arrived on the buses, those aren’t even close to being adjudicated yet,” she says.