Last fall, the Cook County Board of Commissioners approved a $100 million Cook County Disaster Response and Recovery Fund, with $20 million allocated specifically to suburban municipalities for “new arrival” migrant assistance.

The deadline for applications is Friday. And while there are more than 100 suburbs in the county that are eligible, only two have applied, including Oak Park and Ford Heights.

“We applied for funding to help,” Ford Heights Mayor Charles R. Griffin said in an interview with WTTW News. “This is a humanitarian effort, and we’re in it for the long haul, whether it’s migrants, Caucasians or Black folks. We want to put an apparatus in place to help out.”

Ford Heights has teamed up with local nonprofits Empowerment Anywhere and BEDS Plus Care to use the funds for a new migrant shelter that will open later this month.

“We’ll have a 40-bed shelter,” said Empowerment Anywhere executive coordinator Chelsea Thomas, who is serving as the facility coordinator at the shelter. “And we also are using it for food, for security, for the supplies that we need to take care of them … for job readiness, ESL training. So that when they leave there, they’re prepared to live a better life.”

Thomas said the new shelter will create new jobs and provide opportunities for volunteers to give back to the community.

The grants can only be paid directly to the governments of Cook County suburbs. But once the funds are received, these municipalities have the option to transfer the money to other organizations, including academic institutions, health centers and nonprofits like Respond Now, which would use the funding to provide critical rental assistance to asylum seekers.

“There’s $20 million available to assist with, as far as Respond Now is concerned, an impending crisis of people who are living in the south suburbs, who are settled out and in homes and renting homes,” Respond Now executive director Carl Wolf said. “They’ve received three months’ worth of assistance from the state. They have yet to receive their work authorizations from the federal government, and now that that assistance from the state is running out, they’re in danger of eviction. So we are concerned, at least by now, that these families that have settled out in the suburbs are going to be in danger of eviction and then homeless.”

According to Wolf, some of the reasons more Cook County suburbs have yet to apply for migrant funding include capacity issues and political implications.

As for what will happen to the remaining resources from the Disaster Response and Recovery Fund, WTTW News reached out to the Cook County Department of Emergency Management and Regional Security, which said in an email, “The remaining amount will still be available for a suburban municipality facing a declared disaster. The new arrivals response remains a declared disaster under a disaster proclamation from Governor Pritzker.”

And while Friday is the deadline for grant applications, the department wrote, “We have communicated that for any community that has shown interest in the funding but needs further technical assistance to finalize a proposal, we will continue the dialogue beyond tomorrow to work with them.”