Farmers Weekly Review

By Nick Reiher

From the very first speaker who barged up to the microphone and badgered Joliet Township Clerk Alicia Morales about wearing a mask, blaring — “How do we move these people out of here … This is my city … This is our city!” — to the final, similar but more subdued comments around three hours later, most of the 400 or so people who filled the Bicentennial Park Theatre for the October 10 township meeting let officials know they were not pleased about the state awarding the township an $8.6 million grant to help provide services for local asylum-seekers flooding in to Illinois.

Township Supervisor Angel Contreras told them in a prepared statement before the three-hour barrage the asylum-seekers already are here; more than 2,200 being served in the past year.

He said it was an oversight that the City of Joliet and Joliet Fire Department were included on the grant application without the knowledge of the city’s elected officials.

Contreras didn’t say much more during the rest of the three-hour public comment period; the crowd being advised it was their time to comment. It would not be a dialogue. There would be no vote that evening on the grant.

He and the board then sat stoically as speakers offered comments that could be summed up as, “Let’s take care of the people who need it here first.” The volume and venom ranged from calm and reasoned to borderline assault.

Joliet police officers stood at the exits to the theatre, ready to handle any physical concerns. Anticipating a much larger-than-normal crowd, Contreras moved the meeting from the cozy township office several hundred feet west to Bicentennial Park. Police also handled traffic control around the entrance to Bicentennial Park on the east side of the Jefferson Street Bridge.

Among the speakers, veterans testified in support of their homeless colleagues who had difficulty finding services in the area. A representative of the Veterans Assistance Commission of Will County said they already were overwhelmed, with too many needs and not enough workers.

Although they were warned with removal, many in the audience offered catcalls, sometimes obscene, when hearing something they didn’t like from other speakers, or encouraging those with whom they agreed.

They were hurt, one speaker said, and angry because such a large decision was made by Contreras with no input from the community and with no transparency.

At one point, Joliet Mayor Terry D’Arcy jumped the line of speakers and, as he had said before, told the board to withdraw from the state grant. He received applause as he left.

But he was only one of the few who addressed the dubious manner in which the city, fire department, county Health Department and other service providers were named in the grant unknowingly.

Not knowing, or maybe not caring about the difference between immigrants waiting years for citizenship or asylum-seekers who are required to cross the border into America to apply for the opportunity to get away from unwarranted persecution in their home countries, speakers of various races told the board their families came in legally, with a sponsor; not swarming across the border. These people should come in legally, too, if at all.

“Put ‘em on a plane, and send ‘em back to their countries,” one man said. A pastor of a local church said her flock deserves asylum from crime and drugs.

Instead, she said, the grant would help, “people who don’t belong here.” That elicited a comment later from a man who wondered about the pastor’s commitment to Christianity.

“Give them a chance to be part of your community,” one man who had emigrated 50 years ago said through catcalls. “You might be surprised.”

Contreras and D’Arcy have not yet responded for comments on the meeting.

Nick Reiher is editor of Farmers Weekly Review.

Speakers who supported helping asylum-seekers often had to suffer through cat calls, some obscene.

Joliet Township Supervisor Angel Contreras reads a statement addressing his grant application to help asylum-seekers to a mostly antagonistic crowd during the October 10 township meeting.