CHICAGO – She didn’t know the neighborhood.
The 35-year-old Venezuelan found a listing of one-bedroom apartments on Facebook in the Roseland neighborhood, 17 miles south of where she was staying at a migrant shelter at the Inn of Chicago.
Facing pressure from city officials to leave the shelter in mid-June, she took public transportation with her 1-year-old son to meet a man who had posted online that he had some rooms for rent.
She knew it was risky, but she didn’t know that in the Far South Side neighborhood where she was going, 10 people had been killed in homicides that year. She didn’t know there were 265 reports of domestic assault and 12 reports of sexual assault. She didn’t know that few people had been arrested for these crimes.
In early June, as she walked behind Roseland Community Hospital to look at a possible new apartment, a man approached her and offered help. She refused, but he took her to an alley.
There, he cornered her and warned her not to scream as he tore her clothes and bit her breast. Her son was sitting in the stroller looking and screaming.
“The only thing I could do at that moment was grab (my son). (My son) held me and didn’t let go,” said the woman in Spanish, whose name was not released because she was a victim of sexual assault and abuse.
As thousands of migrants frantically search for housing, and the city steadily closes the shelters that have housed them over the past two years, experts say migrant women may be more likely to be exposed to sexual exploitation and sexual harm — especially if they are homeless. and without legal support.
Organizations and volunteers in Chicago who help victims of sexual violence say they have already seen an increase in cases of migrant victims. They fear, however, that many will not be reported.
Elizabeth Payne, legal director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, called the variables stacked against migrant women a “perfect storm.”
“Predators are aware that people in vulnerable situations are less likely to report,” Payne said.
‘We don’t know the city’
The woman said she went looking for an apartment in South Chicago in June because she was afraid of sleeping on the street. In mid-May, shelter staff told her that she, her husband and three children needed to leave the hotel where they were staying in Streeterville by June 10.
All families living in shelters were informed at the time that they would have to leave after 60 days, but that they could reapply for shelter beds if there was space. They would go to the city’s “arrival zone” – or to a parking lot where migrants sleep on CTA buses and are processed for re-entry into one of the 16 shelters that were then housing more than 7,000 migrants. “The city’s goal has always been to provide temporary and emergency shelter, not long-term housing, and to connect people to other resources,” said Beatriz Ponce de Leon, the city’s deputy mayor for immigrant, migrant and refugee rights. , in a statement. to the Tribune.
However, the woman has a history of heart disease and cancer. She sometimes faints. She told the Chicago Tribune in May that she was worried about how sleeping on the bus would affect her medical condition.
Her doctor wrote an advisory note to shelter workers on May 15: “It is important to stay in a shelter if she has more episodes of syncope (fainting).”
In response to his health, shelter workers extended his stay at the shelter for several weeks. She said her family, however, received no help or guidance on how to find housing.
Before going to Roseland, she said she desperately searched for apartment ads on Facebook because she didn’t want to sleep on a bus due to her fragile health. “We don’t know the city. We don’t know the neighborhoods here,” she said.
‘She had a man chasing her’
On June 7, she said she took a bus to Roseland to meet a Venezuelan man named José David, who told her he was going to visit an apartment.
With just a few weeks to find housing and her husband working almost every day, she headed to Roseland alone. It was there that she was beaten and sexually assaulted, according to police.
At about 1 p.m., she was on the phone with David, heading to look at the apartment, when a different man approached her, she said. “He said he would accompany me to where I was going and asked if my son was hungry or if I needed help. I said no,” she said. He told her not to make too much noise, or he would kill her son. He cornered her and forced her to the ground, according to the police report. He slapped her buttocks.
“¡Mami, mommy!” she remembers her son crying. David heard the entire incident over the phone. “I heard her scream. She was asking for help. She said there was a man chasing her,” he said.
The attacker fled the scene, according to police. She then walked to Roseland Community Hospital, where officers helped her file a report. She had minor injuries and was in stable condition. The attacker is still at large, police said, and detectives are investigating. She said she couldn’t see the attacker’s face.
Afterwards, she had terrible nightmares. She replayed the scene to herself in her head. She would see someone who looked like the man who attacked her and be convinced that she wanted to hurt her son. In the shelter’s dining room a few days after the incident, she said she went into crisis mode because she saw a man who had the same strong, muscular body as her attacker.
“I started screaming. Screaming like crazy,” she said. “Everyone looked at me. No one at the shelter knew what had happened to me.”
The administrative staff and shelter workers came to help calm her. They assured him that he was a migrant at the shelter, not a stranger from the neighborhood. In the weeks following the attack, shelter workers extended the shelter’s exit date to mid-July. She had weekly therapy at the shelter and at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which she said helped significantly.
But she said some social workers at the Inn of Chicago told her they thought she had fabricated the entire incident to enhance her family’s ability to stay at the shelter. A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services said he could not answer questions specific to the case in order to protect the woman’s privacy. He said shelter staff receive training to “approach their interventions and support in a trauma-informed way.”
Migrant women may be more vulnerable, experts say
Even before the attack in Roseland, the woman said she had a deep fear that she or her family members would be attacked. Her family was living in Ecuador to escape political violence in their home country when she said an armed group arrived and kidnapped her 18-year-old daughter last March. The kidnapping lasted less than 24 hours, she said, but her daughter was seriously injured. “When I saw her, she was hunched over. She was hit so hard that she didn’t recognize me. My own daughter didn’t know who I was,” she said.
Facing repeated threats, the family decided to leave for the United States in October 2023. They arrived at the Chicago shelter in mid-December.
The woman said she could never shake the image of her 18-year-old daughter bent over and beaten. Therefore, she said, the idea of living on the street with her daughter and two children under the age of 10 terrified her.
A house in any neighborhood would be better than living abroad, she thought. A recent Tribune investigation found that a state rental assistance program pushed many asylum seekers in houses in the south and west zones of the city, where rent is more affordable.
But as migrants move into neighborhoods known for having higher crime rates, immigration lawyers fear the worst for many women.
They say the legal system can be scary for someone who is in the country without legal permission. A migrant may be afraid to report anything to the police for fear of putting their legal status at risk.
Payne said the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation has seen several cases involving newly arrived migrants over the past year, but she suspects there are many more that are not being reported.
Chicago police were unable to provide how many migrant women have reported sexual assaults this year because the department does not record immigration status in its reports.
Anna Maitland, supervising attorney at Legal Aid Chicago’s Trafficking Survivors Assistance Project, said in a recent interview that many of the immigrant women she works with have histories of serious sexual violence, whether in their home countries or at home. trips to the USA.
She said she expects more migrants to be tapped in Chicago in the coming years.
“The longer they stay in these situations of poverty, where they don’t have work authorization and can’t get housing, the more vulnerable they become,” she said.
A new block
The woman was recovering, but faced a looming deadline from the city to leave the shelter. She found a second apartment in the Austin neighborhood, in a unit above where another Venezuelan family lived.
“I don’t know the neighborhood, but we have no other option,” she said at the time, still in the shelter. “We have nothing.” She and her family packed their bags and moved their belongings out of the Inn of Chicago on July 7, a month after she was attacked.
On the block where they live now, there were 30 criminal incidents last year, ranging from armed robberies and shootings to assault and domestic battery, according to crime data. In a nearby apartment, an adult allegedly sexually abused a child, according to the data. There were no arrests.
The woman said she faces a wall of uncertainty, like other migrants who have been forced to leave municipal and state shelters.
Her husband works two jobs and works long hours to earn enough money to pay rent and buy food for their family of five. Her 18-year-old daughter also works to survive. But neither she nor her husband have a work permit.
“I hope my life normalizes,” she said. “I just want a job so I can have a stable life. A legal job. They have applied for asylum and are waiting to hear about the progress of their case.
She was told this week that she has the option of applying for a U visa, a legal form of protection for someone who has suffered substantial physical or mental harm as the victim of a crime that occurred in the United States.
However, only 10,000 people are approved for a U visa in any given year. Immigration lawyers say it can take more than a decade for someone’s legal status to be changed through this process. For the woman, gathering all the correct documentation and obtaining a police report on her case was complicated, she said, since few Chicago police officers she interacted with speak Spanish. “I didn’t get a lot of information,” she said. “Every time I call, they tell me my detective isn’t there.”
Isolation
In the days following his move to Austin, reality slowly began to sink in. In her new apartment, there’s a bracket on the wall near the front door designed to hold a two-by-four so no one can break in. the door frames are broken, the paint is peeling. Your 1-year-old son is being bitten by mosquitoes. Cockroaches slide across the floor. She stays inside the house because she is afraid of going out alone. “I don’t want to expose myself,” she said.
On a recent afternoon, her 9-year-old son played in the tall grass outside. She watched him from the window.
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(Joe Mahr of the Chicago Tribune contributed.)
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