Lydia Wong: Welcoming Migrants Bussed From Texas (CCW Ep 22)
In this episode of “Coffee with Catholic Workers,” Theo Kayser interviews co-host Lydia Wong about Emmaus House’s work responding to the urgent needs of migrants sent north from the southern border and sleeping on Chicago police precinct floors without food and bedding.
In this episode of “Coffee with Catholic Workers,” Theo Kayser interviews co-host Lydia Wong about Emmaus House’s work responding to the urgent needs of migrants sent north from the southern border and sleeping on Chicago police precinct floors without food and bedding.
Episode transcript
The following episode transcript was autogenerated by AI from the audio transcript and subsequently reviewed and lightly edited ; all the usual caveats apply. It’s provided here to aid discoverability. If you’d like to help provide episode summaries or transcripts for Coffee with Catholic Worker episodes, reach out at info@catholicworker.org.
Theo: Welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers, a podcast made by and for Catholic Workers. I’m Theo, and I’m Lydia. We’ve both been a part of the Catholic Worker for the last decade, and we are excited to bring you conversations with different Catholic Workers around the world. I’m really excited for today’s guest because it’s Lydia! Surprise! She and I talked about the much-needed work the Emmaus House Community has been doing, supporting migrants who’ve been bused north by the governor of Texas. Let’s turn to the interview.
Theo: Alright, well, I am very excited for this week’s guest, Lydia Wong. Ever since we did the Theo episode, I only thought it would be fair to do a Lydia one. So, Lydia, welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers. Why don’t you tell us first off a little bit about your journey to the Catholic Worker?
Lydia: Thanks, Theo. I know I wasn’t letting you pin me down for a while. My journey to the Catholic Worker came in a bit of a roundabout way. I’m not Catholic, so I had never heard of the Catholic Worker or Dorothy Day, but I had heard of intentional communities, and that was a concept very interesting to me. After moving to Chicago for grad school for social work, once I finished school, I was interested in looking into intentional communities. A friend and I were looking at communities, and she had been told about somebody trying to start a Catholic Worker. I did not know what that meant, but I started meeting with a group of people exploring the idea of how to start a Catholic Worker. We called ourselves Emmaus House and attended Catholic Worker Gatherings, but I had objected to calling ourselves a Catholic Worker because I didn’t feel like I had a good grasp of what that meant. Eventually, we sort of accidentally became a Catholic Worker since everyone viewed us as one anyway. That would have been around 2011. We started out with five of us moving in together, renting an apartment. We weren’t doing much short-term hospitality initially because we felt like we needed to really take time to get to know each other and the neighborhood. Eventually, as we got more space, we started hosting people, mostly people being released from migrant detention. We ended up living there for about two years before being able to purchase the home we’re in now, which is in the same neighborhood. Now we still have five community members here and a lot more space to host guests at Emmaus House.
Theo: What do you think was that early draw to community for you? What made you want to try it, and how did those early days live up to the vision, or did you know what to expect?
Lydia: I really appreciated the idea of communal life, of life together. Shane Claiborne’s writing and his community, The Simple Way, influenced me with the idea of loving your neighbor and doing life together. In the early days, all of us who lived in that apartment look back at it with great fondness, even though we were living on top of each other. We were renting from a civil rights leader, Clyde Ross, who had done a bunch of work against contract buying in Chicago. We were able to hear his stories and learn from him and the people he introduced us to. That living situation was temporary for us, but for many people in the neighborhood, it’s not temporary. It was a real lived experience of what it is to be in the neighborhood.
Theo: Did your family have thoughts about this, or your friends? And you’ve been doing it a while, is it the same now?
Lydia: My family has always been super supportive. I come from an Evangelical Christian background, and they’ve been very supportive. My family has come out several times to the Catholic Worker and usually gets done a good number of house projects. They’ve never been concerned that this is like a phase or that I should move out or sort of grow up or have a more stable traditional life. I’ve always appreciated that quite a bit because that is not the case for everyone.
Theo: Tell me what life is looking like nowadays at Emmaus House. I understand you’ve been helping migrant folks who haven’t really had proper shelter.
Lydia: Right now, a lot of our focus at the house is centered outside of the house. At the moment, we only have one guest staying with us. Over the past two years, Texas has been busing tens of thousands of migrants, primarily Venezuelans, from the southern border to Chicago. There’s been 26,000 new arrivals into Chicago, and initially, it was a small trickle, but in May, things sort of exploded. The city was housing people in hotels, but in May, things grew rapidly, and they were not able to respond. Their response was to have people sleep at police station lobbies, literally in the lobby of a police station. They weren’t providing anything for them, no water, blankets, clothing, food, literally nothing. All across the city, these small groups began organizing at each station. Our house sits between two stations, District 11 and District 10, and we became heavily involved in caring for both of those stations. We had a very small group of volunteers, primarily us and our extended community on our block, along with a handful of other people. Our neighborhood is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. People were living there, and we were busing people to our house for showers, taking meals over for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, providing water, shuttling gallons of water back and forth, doing things like just trying to provide basic clothing for people, trying to arrange for people to have contact with their family through Wi-Fi or phones, getting a mountain of donations. We still have two of our spare bedrooms filled with donations and many donations in our garage. Gradually, the city started building up some of their services, like giving food, but the city didn’t start providing lunch for all stations until September, which is multiple months in, and at that point, there were 2,000 people staying in police stations across the city. At the peak, there were around 2,600 to 2,800 people in police stations, and that was far overflowing the lobbies. We were sourcing and providing tents and sleeping bags, having at District 10 near us at one point about 70 to 80 people outside with an additional 40 people inside. It was definitely intense because if we were not supplying things, people would not eat, people would not drink, people would not have clothing. Then things started to get colder, and the intensity really started ratcheting up. We had unseasonably cold weather beginning in October, dipping down into the 30s, with multiple families outside, people totally unprepared for the cold. We were trying to make sure that people had warm clothing, that when it rained, we could come the next day with dry clothing because everybody was soaked out there. Our worker is a little bit different in that everybody either works a traditional job or is in school currently except for me. I was primarily doing this as a full-time job. It was definitely intense, multiple weeks of 40 or 50 hours a week of both caring for these two stations and transporting donations from richer parts of the city down to the poorer parts. Things have slowed down a little bit, enough shelters have now opened that everyone is out of police stations as of December 15th, but that was a long haul and some cold weather for people to still be living outside.
Theo: It’s pretty wild that they didn’t give them food or water or anything like that. It makes me wonder, is it intentional neglect or incapability from the city? Both of those are really bad, especially with climate change. If they can’t handle 2,000 meals and water, what are they going to do if a tornado or something hits Chicago?
Lydia: It’s a political touchpoint. Lots of political tensions and any action or inaction has political ramifications. There was a huge bureaucratic mess to designate money for anything when it’s not already in the city budget. The city was setting up shelters, converting big warehouses, and they were doing meals there, but also not providing much else. So while there were 2,000 people in stations at the peak, there also were another 12,000 people in shelters, and the city was paying a ridiculously expensive contract for food there. So there is some bureaucracy, there is some ineptitude. The previous administration transferred things over right early in the year, so the current mayor sort of came into this mess already being set up. And then there just then is this lack of care. I think it was easy to ignore people. I think there was a reliance on volunteers because honestly, it was cheaper that way to rely on free labor and the goodwill of people to take care of people.
Theo: How were you all able to muster all of these resources that people need, all the clothes and food and stuff? Did you have a donation base you could call on already to mobilize all that?
Lydia: We did start some GoFundMes, and we had a congregation of nuns that donated us a good chunk of money that really helped out for our Westside stations. There was a citywide fundraiser that raised a good amount of money that volunteers could submit receipts for reimbursement, so that helped out significantly. Our house has already been involved in a lot of food rescue with mutual aid organizations. Since 2020, we had been helping with Westside Mutual Aid. We actually helped start that in 2020 to help do grocery delivery in particular for people who were immunocompromised or elderly and couldn’t go out during the pandemic. That has continued, and we still help along with a network of others do food delivery within the Westside neighborhoods every Saturday. We had access to some food through that. We have a cold storage, a dry goods warehouse. There’s a network of mutual aid organizations within Chicago that saves hundreds of tons of food every year. We did have some access to that, and then we found that we could tap into the rich white suburbs as long as we had donation points that were in the north side. I had a church set up in Evanston, not even in Chicago but north of Chicago, and there were weeks when I could take a U-Haul there Tuesday and Thursday and fill it up both days just with donations from people in the richer areas of Chicago. I would take that and transport that both to our stations on the west side but then also drop off to multiple stations on the south sides that just couldn’t get that kind of donation base on their own.
Theo: I really admire the whole project because it sounds like you all are doing a ton of work, and it is very Catholic workery in that it’s just us and our group of friends doing it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s beautiful, and it has also been the most difficult thing to make any decisions because, much like the Catholic Worker, although this was less poorly defined compared to all Catholic Worker houses, there’s no leader of the collective group across the city because it’s all happening sort of autonomously station by station. It was very interesting to try to interact with this to be like, okay, who’s in charge, who’s a representative? There were technically leads for each station, but by leads, it was like, okay, this person agrees to be on the group WhatsApp thread for cross-city communication. That was an interesting piece because it was sort of all thrown together only by this common time of helping people at stations. It was this very decentralized network that was perhaps too decentralized because there wasn’t actually any agreed-upon way to make decisions of how to release a statement or what process we approve of when nobody is quite sure who “we” is. It’s been an interesting experiment, this idea of what does, on a very large scale, decentralized decision-making look like. What does it look like to do decentralized care in a cooperative way? We’re looking at 23 different groups caring for their individual station in a decentralized way.
Theo: You haven’t figured that totally out, but what is one thing you definitely figured out? If I’m starting a mutual aid-type project like this, what’s your number one tip or trick?
Lydia: Just say no to those unsorted bags of random donations; it’s not worth it. A flood of donations and unneeded donations has been the most difficult thing. In terms of mutual aid networks, I think that establishing early on what the common values are, what the common organizing principles or agreed-upon processes are, is important. There have been many disagreements of how abolitionist or not the group is, how much or little did people want to interface with politicians or the city, and what level of cooperation or dissent are people comfortable with. Figuring some of that out early on would have made some of those larger, more impactful decisions easier later on.
Theo: It is one thing about the Catholic Worker movement is that we don’t bother with having to come up with agreed-upon values beyond our own community in a certain way, for better or worse sometimes, perhaps.
Lydia: It does become an interesting piece of what does it mean to try to create the sort of world that Peter Maurin spoke about, but on a large scale, when people have other desperate beliefs. People had enough shared belief to be doing some things together but definitely did not have identical beliefs. So there is an interesting piece of how can we help create this world that Peter Maurin thought about, recognizing that even in such a world, we won’t all agree on everything or won’t all have the same frame of reference.
Theo: I am a little curious how that played out in the work you all have been involved with. You mentioned abolitionism being a topic of conversation. I wonder how you all settled on that, particularly if there are thoughts around it because of the migrant folks who’ve been staying at police stations and what that has been affecting their experience.
Lydia: There were definitely some volunteers who went into it not so abolitionist and came out of it much more abolitionist, particularly because of their experiences with the police in the stations. Most of the time, people had very little interaction with the police because they weren’t doing anything for the care of migrants. On the worst of it, police would actively harass the people staying there or harass volunteers. There wasn’t ever any real understanding among volunteers on many decisions, in part because there wasn’t an agreed-upon decision process. Making group statements or group decisions was always difficult, and that never was resolved, unfortunately. That’s a lot of work, and nobody really had time for that sort of difficult work because everyone was so overwhelmed by the current needs. Most volunteers have full-time jobs on top of what they were doing, and many people were far stretched beyond their emotional capacity or time capacity. It was sort of one of those very dysfunctional functional organisms.
Theo: I’m curious to learn what meal you learned to prepare the best during your months of doing this and if you have a secret to what makes it so good.
Lydia: I did not do the most meals, but I did get pretty good at making massive amounts of scrambled eggs, large things of rice, or very large trays of oatmeal. Or, in a pinch, I’d be the person who brought really bad breakfast by going to the supermarket and getting pandel say, sweet bread, and just bringing that for breakfast. It’s a lot of people to make breakfast for.
Theo: Thanks, Lydia, for telling us about everything going on at Emmaus House. Is there anything else exciting we should know about before we wrap today?
Lydia: That has heavily taken up a lot of our time and space here. I think we’re excited to look into a new chapter in hospitality. We’ve got two rooms that are currently open, and we’re looking at trying to do some kitchen renovations that are desperately needed. I think we’re hopeful that will give us some new opportunities and new things to move towards, and that makes it exciting because it’s always fun to dream about big ideas of what to do next.
Theo: Are you going to do that kitchen work yourself?
Lydia: Unfortunately, no. We have enough large things that need to be done that we’re going to have to pull a permit from the city of Chicago, which limits what I can do. We’re actually just crossing our fingers that the city inspectors won’t choose to have a problem with all the other work that we’ve already done.
Theo: Alright, well, thanks! That wraps up another episode of Coffee with Catholic Workers. If you’d like to reach out to us with comments, suggestions, or clarification of thought, you can email us at CoffeewithCatholicWorkers@gmail.com. We want to thank our Catholic Worker audio engineer Chris, as well as David Hayes for our music and Becky McIntyre for our graphic. Thanks for joining us again for some clarification of thought. We hope today’s conversation and discussion have been enlightening and maybe even that you’re encouraged to go out and help build a world where it’s easier to be good.
Coffee with Catholic Workers is a podcast by and about Catholic Workers. Every two weeks, join Lydia Wong and Theo Kayser for a conversation with some of their favorite Catholic Worker folk. Special thanks to sound engineer Chris of Bloomington, IN.
