CHICAGO — She didn’t know the neighborhood.
The 35-year-old Venezuelan had found an apartment listing on Facebook for a room 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 by mid-June, she took public transportation with her 1-year-old to meet a man who had posted online that he had a few 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 so far that year. She didn’t know there were 265 reports of domestic battery and 12 reports of sexual assault. She didn’t know that few people had been arrested for those crimes.
In early June, as she walked behind Roseland Community Hospital to see a possible new apartment, a man approached her and offered help. She refused, but he proceeded to back her into an alley.
There, he cornered her and warned her not to yell as he tore at her clothes and bit her breast. Her child sat in the stroller watching and screaming.
“The only thing I could do at that moment was grab (my son). (My son) held on to me and wouldn’t let go,” said the woman in Spanish, whose name is being withheld because she is a victim of battery and sexual abuse.
As thousands of migrants are on the frantic search for housing, with the city steadily closing the shelters that have housed them for 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 helping victims of sexual assault say they have already seen an uptick in cases with migrant victims. They fear, however, that many are going unreported.
Elizabeth Payne, legal director at 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 first went to look for an apartment in south Chicago in June because she feared sleeping on the street. In mid-May, she was told by shelter workers that she and her husband and three kids needed to leave the hotel where they were staying in Streeterville by June 10.
All families living in shelters were told at the time that they had to leave after 60 days but could reapply for shelter beds if there was space. They would go to the city’s “landing zone” — or a parking lot where migrants sleep on CTA buses and get processed to reenter one of the 16 shelters that were then housing over 7,000 migrants. “The city’s goal has always been to provide temporary, 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 passes out. She told the Chicago Tribune in May that she worried about how sleeping on a bus would affect her medical condition.
Her doctor wrote an advisory note to shelter workers on May 15: “Having a shelter stay is important if she has more episodes of syncope (passing out).”
In response to her health condition, shelter workers extended her shelter stay for several weeks. She said her family, however, received no help or coaching on how to find housing.
Before going to Roseland, she said she desperately searched for apartment listings on Facebook because she didn’t want to sleep on a bus with her tenuous health condition.“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 Jose David, who had told her he would do a walk-through of an apartment.
With only a few weeks to find housing and her husband working most days, she went to Roseland alone. It was there she was battered and sexually abused, according to police.
At about 1 p.m., she was on the phone with David, heading to the apartment viewing, when a different man approached her, she said. “He said he would accompany me 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 a lot of noise, or he would kill her child. He cornered her and forced her to the ground, according to the police report. He slapped her buttocks.
“¡Mami, Mami!” she recalls her child crying out. David heard the entire incident over the phone.“I heard her scream. She was asking for help. She said she had a man chasing her,” he said.
The assailant fled the scene, according to police. She then walked to Roseland Community Hospital, where officers helped her file a police report. She had minor injuries and was listed in stable condition.The offender is still at large, police said, and detectives are investigating. She said she was unable to see her attacker’s face.
Afterward, she had bad nightmares. She repeated the scene over to herself in her head. She would see someone who looked like the man who attacked her and convince herself they wanted to hurt her child. In the dining room at the shelter a few days after the incident, she said she entered 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. Nobody staying at the shelter knew what had happened to me.”
Shelter administrative staff and workers came to help calm her down. They reassured her that he was a migrant man staying in the shelter, not an outsider from the neighborhood. In the weeks following the attack, shelter workers extended her shelter exit date to mid-July. She went to weekly therapy at the shelter and at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which she said helped significantly.
But she said some case workers at the Inn of Chicago told her they thought she’d made up the entire incident to extend her family’s ability to stay at the shelter. A spokesman for the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services said he couldn’t answer case specific questions in order to protect the privacy of the woman. 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-rooted fear of her or her family members being assaulted. Her family had been living in Ecuador to escape political violence in their home country when she said an armed group came and kidnapped her 18-year-old daughter last March. The kidnapping lasted less than 24 hours, she said, but her daughter was severely injured.“When I saw her, she was bent over. She had been hit so hard 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 quite shake the image of her 18-year-old daughter bent over and beaten. For that reason, she said, the idea of living on the street with her daughter and two sons under the age of 10 terrified her.
A house in any neighborhood would be better than living outside, she thought. A recent Tribune investigation found that a state rental assistance program has pushed many asylum-seekers into homes on the South and West sides of the city, where rent is more affordable.
But as migrants move into neighborhoods known to have higher crime rates, immigration lawyers fear the worst for many women.
They say the legal system can be daunting for someone who is in the country without legal permission. A migrant may be wary to report anything to the police for fear of jeopardizing their legal status.
Payne said the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation saw several cases involving newly arrived migrants over the past year, but she suspects there are many more that are not being reported.
Chicago police could not provide how many migrant women reported sexual assaults this year because the department does not track immigration status in its reports.
Anna Maitland, supervisory attorney for the Trafficking Survivors Assistance Project at Legal Aid Chicago, said in a recent interview that many of the immigrant women she works with have stories of severe sexual assault, either in their countries of origin or on their journeys to the U.S.
She said she expects more migrants to be taken advantage of in Chicago over the next few years.
“The longer that they are in these impoverished situations where they don’t have work authorization and they can’t get housing, the more vulnerable they become,” she said.
A new block
The woman was recovering but facing 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 family from Venezuela was living.
“I don’t know the neighborhood, but we don’t have another option,” she said at the time while still at the shelter. “We don’t have anything.” She and her family packed up and moved their belongings out of the Inn of Chicago on July 7, a month after she was attacked.
On the block where they are now living, there were 30 criminal incidents last year, ranging from armed robberies and shootings to domestic battery and assault, according to crime data. In one nearby apartment, an adult allegedly sexually assaulted a child, according to the data. There were no arrests.
The woman said she’s facing a wall of uncertainty, just like the other migrants who have been forced out of city and state-run shelters.
Her husband has two jobs and works long hours to make enough money to pay rent and buy food for their family of five. Their 18-year-old daughter is also working to make ends meet. But neither she nor her husband has 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 status of their case.
She was told this week that she has the option to apply for a U visa, a legal form of protection for someone who has experienced substantial mental or physical harm as a 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 over a decade to get someone’s legal status changed through that process. For the woman, gathering all the right paperwork and obtaining the police report for her case has been complicated, she said, since few Chicago police officers she has interacted with speak Spanish. “I haven’t gotten much information back at all,” she said. “Every time I call, they tell me my detective is not there.”
Isolation
In the days following her move to Austin, reality is slowly sinking in. In her new apartment, there is a brace on the wall by the front door designed to hold a two-by-four so no one can break in. She said the door frames are broken, the paint peeling. Her 1-year-old is being bitten by mosquitoes. Cockroaches skitter across the floor. She stays inside because she’s scared to leave alone. “I don’t want to expose myself,” she said.
On a recent afternoon, her 9-year-old played in the overgrown grass outside. She watched him from the window.
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(Chicago Tribune’s Joe Mahr contributed.)
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