City contractor ‘failed’ clients as migrant shelter complaints mounted, staffers say
Reina Jerez Garcia, pictured on the far South Side with her husband, German Median, and sons, Victor Garcia, William Garcia and Yefferson Garcia, lived in a shelter on Chicago’s far North Side run by Favorite Healthcare Staffing. Garcia said she received unacceptably small food portions and limited drinking water when she lived at the shelter. Efrain Soriano for Borderless Magazine.
This story was a collaboration between the Investigative Project on Race and Equity and Borderless Magazine. Contributing reporting by Jonathan Torres, Katrina Pham and Martha Contreras.
Reina Isabel Jerez Garcia filed a grievance with the City of Chicago last fall when staff started serving smaller meals at the city-funded migrant shelter where she and her teenage son were staying.
Dinner was a scoop of rice and a couple of pieces of meat at the Super 8, a compact motel building on the far North Side. The city’s main shelter contractor, Kansas City-based Favorite Healthcare Staffing, opened the shelter at the Super 8 in July 2023.
Other changes at the shelter worried Jerez, 40, a lawyer and advocate for the rights of victims of violence in Colombia. Amid increasing threats from guerilla groups, she and her family left the city of Cúcuta to seek asylum in early 2023.
She said shelter staff, who worked for Favorite, wouldn’t let anyone, even kids, take more than two bottles of water a day. Staff were also blocking residents from bringing in donations of winter clothing, though the temperature was dropping, and the shelter wasn’t providing any to arriving families.
“The treatment was terrible,” said Jerez. As she and her son, then 16, awaited the arrival of the rest of their family — Jerez’s husband, two younger sons and an adopted daughter — she organized with other residents to push back against the changes.
In grievances filed later that year, another migrant parent said that Favorite staff blamed the food shortage on the city. “I don’t believe that the government told them to only give us a spoonful of rice,” the resident wrote in Spanish in a December 2023 grievance, adding that workers treated residents with hostility. “Enough with the xenophobia.”