When I lived in the Sonoran Desert, I came to know it as a place of majesty and tragedy. The pink sand desert has incredible biodiversity and a vibrant border culture. But it can be an unforgiving place with coyotes, scorpions, rattlesnakes and, yes, temperatures in the 120s. In fact, temperatures in Phoenix surpassed 110 degrees 55 times this summer — tying last year’s record and causing at least 177 deaths.

The U.S. government has long wielded Arizona’s hostile environment as a weapon to control immigration. Those who know the land observe that over time, immigration enforcement patterns shifted border crossing points to increasingly desolate and dangerous areas with the notion that migrants would be deterred from making the trip. In desperation, they came anyway. The effort to save lives and count the lives lost in the desert is a serious undertaking by organizations such as Humane Borders and No More Deaths.

Now, I live in Illinois where I am a political science professor studying American politics and immigration. The underlying philosophy of the federal government’s immigration control tactics is deterrence through attrition — essentially making it so difficult to immigrate that people simply give up. Immigrant rights activists and scholars call this the “misery strategy” because these policies make it hard to survive, much less claim asylum rights or ask for help. Despite the fact that there are now more people fleeing conflict, famine and persecution than ever in history, Latin Americans were told: “Do not come.”

In summer 2022, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott began busing migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border to urban destinations such as Chicago. Observers have argued, and I agree, that the cynical actions by Abbott made vulnerable families props in political theater.

Some of these families ended up in overcrowded shelters or with no shelter at all. I would argue that these outcomes are just the latest implementation of “the misery strategy.” State and local governments scrambled to meet the needs of asylum-seekers. This is reminiscent of the unpreparedness of the federal bureaucracy for the “zero tolerance” separation policy of Donald Trump’s administration. Children were detained in chain-link cages that the little ones called the hielera, or icebox.

Last winter, some families were left to live and sleep on the freezing streets of Chicago, another unforgiving landscape. Now is the time to put measures into place to prevent this shameful pattern from repeating itself.

At the peak of the crisis last January, 15,000 migrants were staying in shelters in Chicago. Most were legal asylum-seekers who exercised their right under U.S. law and international human rights agreements to ask for asylum at a port or border checkpoint. However, most lacked family or relations in the city and were not legally allowed to work. For those fleeing collapsing economies, hunger, lack of medication and political instability, I wonder if it felt like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

This summer, migrants began being evicted from Chicago shelters after 60 days. A mother named Rosa told CBS affiliate WBBM-Ch. 2 her family was evicted from the shelter near her 5-year-old son’s school, but they declined to move to a new shelter because it was an hour and a half away. In the months before the Democratic National Convention, two new large shelters specifically for migrant populations were opened. But not all families moved into the new shelters because almost a thousand “exited” the system. Clearly, this is by design; the process was complex and alienating. Not surprisingly, some families decided to take their chances. So where did they go? While I would like to believe some are sharing a meal around a family dinner table, I fear that others simply disappeared from our sight and from our concern.

Of course, state and local leaders are trying to address this issue and journalists, are keeping them accountable. And organizations on the ground such as Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Onward Neighborhood House are doing valuable work in awful situations. However, it is clear that this latest crisis isn’t spontaneous combustion. Instead, it fits a very clear historical pattern. At a fundamental level, immigrants to this country are systematically punished. If they survive the frying pan, they still have to make it through the fire.

I understand that leaders are under immense pressure to lessen the pressure on public services, and the city rightly argues that the federal government needs to step up. However, as temperatures drop to the single and negative digits, the answer cannot be to push families out of shelters unless the public can be assured that they have found a lasting place of safety.

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Isabel Skinner is an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois Springfield and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.

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