Immigration advocates in Chicago ‘disappointed and angry’ over lack of reforms, plan DNC protests

Luis Rodriguez spent the morning of his 24th birthday at a Will County Board meeting to speak against a measure that would have declared the county was not a sanctuary for immigrants like him.

After the resolution failed, he joined immigrant advocates on the Near West Side in a yearly celebration of their efforts in Illinois.

Rodriguez lives in the southwest suburbs and has worked as a community organizer for the Southwest Suburban Immigrant Project while his own immigration status remains in limbo. He would be eligible for the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he’s among those who remain shut out of the “Dreamers” program since it stopped accepting new applications.

Now, four years after President Joe Biden’s election brought the return of a Democratic president to the White House, Rodriguez remains undocumented without a path toward legalizing his immigration status.

“I’m disappointed with Biden and the promises that he wasn’t able to keep,” Rodriguez says. “But I’m also terrified with the opposition.”

With Biden having bowed out of the presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris on track to become the party’s nominee, Rodriguez says he wants politicians to keep promises made about immigration reform.

“I’d want to tell them to fight for us,” Rodriguez says of the Democratic leaders who will be in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention next month. “Don’t forget who put you in [an elected] position in the first place.”

He and other immigration advocates talk of their trips to Washington over the past four years to lobby for greater immigrant rights, only to see those bills fail. Many say they’re frustrated and disappointed that Biden wasn’t able to do more to overhaul the immigration system and worry that attitudes toward immigrants seem to have gotten worse.

In Chicago, the arrival of asylum-seekers needing shelter resulted in contentious feelings in some communities.

Immigration is a hot-button issue for Democrats. Some want the federal government to provide funding for cities like Chicago and New York City to help immigrants. Others disagree.

“I think there will be a lively debate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago about immigration,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, a Cornell University Law School professor whose work focuses on immigration law

Facing opposition in Congress, Biden’s administration has relied on executive orders to address immigration issues, such as when it allowed greater numbers of Afghans and Ukrainans to enter the country.

But the administration also has continued to deport a large number of people, Yale-Loehr says. In the 2023 budget year, the United States deported more than 142,500 immigrants, an increase from 2021, when more than 59,000 were deported, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures.

“The Biden administration has done a lot, but really Congress needs to step up the plate to enact immigration reform to once and for all cure our broken immigration system,” Yale-Loehr says.

The Pew Research Center has documented widely differing views between Democrats and Republicans. Its research found that the percentage of voters who think undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the United States dropped from 74% in 2020 to 59% in 2024, signaling a broad change in attitudes nationally.

Glo Choi, a community organizer in Chicago, says immigration seems to be the No. 1 issue for Republicans and that Democrats haven’t done enough to counter how Republicans have portrayed immigrants like himself and those he works with at Chicago’s HANA Center. It’s one of the reasons why he and others from the HANA Center plan to join a coalition of activists organizing two protests the week of the Democratic National Convention.

Immigration rights is among the group’s list of demands, which also calls for the United States to stop sending financial aid to Israel and the advancement of reproductive rights.

“We are incredibly disappointed and angry and frustrated at the government as a whole,” Choi says.

He says that the Biden administration has made promises about an overhaul of immigration that it has failed to deliver, such as efforts to provide work permits for newcomers and some protections from deportation that never materialized.

“There was this loss of hope that’s really hard to describe,” Choi says. “Hope is as much a feeling as it is something active. But when it comes to that more intangible, people were heartbroken. People were disappointed.”

Karina Solano, a volunteer with the Chicago community organization Únete La Villita, says she’s not interested in hearing what top Democrats have to say at the convention because she’s tired of politicians’ promises. She and other members of her group plan to join the demonstrations during the convention.

Solano, who is undocumented, says things haven’t improved for immigrants under Biden, pointing to changes to the asylum process and the continued detention of immigrants. She also sees parallels between the struggles of immigrants in Little Village and Palestinians in Gaza.

“As an organization that focuses heavily on housing justice and fighting against gentrification, these are the very things that we see, for example, in Palestine, where people keep getting pushed out of their own homes and being displaced from their homes,” Solano says. “We see the connection between the U.S.’s involvement in not only Latin America countries that are displacing people and creating more asylum-seekers and refugees, but all over the world.”