LCN’s Community Assistance team aids asylum seekers

La Casa Norte has collaborated with other nonprofits, city agencies, and volunteers to provide assistance to Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers sent to Chicago since last fall.

We sat down with one of our migrant clients to learn more. With her interview translated from Spanish, this is Liliana’s story.

By Melanie Rockoff, Grants and Communications Manager

On July 2, 2022, Liliana González embarked on a two-month journey. With her toddler in her arms, she began a slow, winding ascent northward in search of a better life.

“I want my son to have a future. And here, he can. Here, you can.”

Liliana, 30, and son Matías, 3, number among the more than 7.1 million refugees and migrants who have left Venezuela.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, a majority have sought refuge in neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries, with approximately 465,000 going to the United States.

Last fall, Republican governors in Texas and Florida began haphazardly bussing and flying migrants, many of them Venezuelan, to Democrat-led sanctuary cities, including New York City and Washington, D.C. More than 5,000 people have been transported to Chicago.

The causes of this fraught Venezuelan exodus are many: an overly oil-dependent economy, hyperinflation, increasingly autocratic governance marked by corruption and mismanagement, massive-scale food scarcity, and a global pandemic.

It is amidst this socioeconomic and political maelstrom that Liliana made the difficult decision to leave. Increasingly unable to locate – much less purchase – basic necessities like baby formula, diapers, or medicine, she struggled to envision a future for her then-2-year-old son.

“Here, I can feed him and make sure he has what he needs. I wasn’t able to do that in Venezuela,” she says.

Upon arrival in Chicago in early September, Liliana, her son, and several hundred Venezuelan migrants and asylum seekers were lodged temporarily at a handful of north suburban hotels. There, a network of local nonprofits, civic organizations, and volunteers converged to prepare them for the road ahead.

 La Casa Norte is among these organizations.

 “While I was at the hotel, that’s where I met Luz,” says Liliana, referring to Luz Cortez, manager of La Casa Norte’s Community Assistance Program, based in the Brighton Park neighborhood.

So far, Luz and her bilingual team have provided more than 50 migrant families with in-person, Spanish-language rental application assistance, school and job referrals, legal support, and access to El Mercadito food pantry, a joint collaboration between La Casa Norte and Nourishing Hope.

“It would have been very different without La Casa Norte, Casa Michoacán, Catholic Charities, and all of the organizations that have been helping us. Very different.”

Liliana pauses. “Not just different, but difficult. Very difficult.”

On a blisteringly cold day in late January, after four months living in suburban hotel limbo, Liliana and Matias moved into a cozy apartment in the Pilsen neighborhood. And her good luck didn’t end there.

“I met a woman who was moving back to Puerto Rico who helped me a lot. She was about to leave Chicago, and we had just arrived with absolutely nothing. She left me everything in here,” says Liliana, gesturing to her partially furnished apartment, wide-eyed, as if she can’t quite believe it herself.

“It felt like God was looking out for me – all these beautiful things happening, you know?”

 “I think that, as a migrant, you go through a lot to get here. A lot. But it was worth it. It’s hard to explain – like, look at this,” she says, pointing to a colorful tiled vase left behind by the apartment’s previous tenant. “I never thought I’d have a vase with roses!” she says, laughing.

 When asked about the future, Liliana smiles broadly. “I feel excited. My hope is to enroll Matías in preschool, find a good job, have some things of my own, maybe even a house. I want to be able to have something all my own, where I can say, ‘Look, this is mine. I worked for this.’”

 “I know I can do this. God willing. Using all of the knowledge that I have. I will start from zero.”

Liliana and her son Matías