Thousands of migrants sleeping at police stations woke up to freezing cold conditions this Halloween morning as city officials, volunteers and faith-based organizations scrambled to find warmth for a population, mostly from Venezuela, that has never experienced cold.

Temperatures plummeted overnight to a low of 30 degrees at O’Hare International Airport, said the National Weather Service, and safety networks stepped in to react to emergencies brought on by the cold. Temperatures were expected to stay around 37 degrees with light snow flurries for the next 24 hours, weather officials said.

Tuesday morning, over a dozen migrants waited to get into St. Catherine of Siena-St. Lucy and St. Giles Parish near a police station in Austin for warm showers. Dhian Gomez, 29, from Venezuela, held his hands together and shivered uncontrollably.

“My hands, my hands,” he cried out in Spanish.

Dr. Scott Dresden, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician, said he wasn’t sure how the thousands of migrants that have arrived since last August would influence the numbers of people he treats in emergency departments over the next months.

“This is certainly a unique winter with a larger population who are without housing than we are used to,” he said.

As of Tuesday morning, there were over 2,800 migrants waiting in police stations around the city for placement in city-run shelters — many sleeping outside, according to city data.

Anticipating colder temperatures Monday night, the city released a statement Sunday: “To protect new arrivals and unhoused Chicagoans from falling temperatures, the city is collaborating with external partners, volunteers and mutual aid groups to provide blankets, coats and other much-needed items. Warming buses will be provided by the CTA at the landing location and 16 police district locations.”

The buses were parked from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., according to the volunteers.

Annie Gomberg, who leads volunteer efforts at the police station in Austin, said 16 buses were not enough. And she said she didn’t know about any effort by the city to provide blankets, jackets or outerwear. And many migrants who she interacts with tell her they are hesitant to get on another bus, after riding a bus for hours to get to Chicago.

“We try to help them understand that they’re not going to fall asleep on this bus, and it’s going to drive away to another state,” she said.

At a makeshift encampment with over 50 tents in a park across the street from the Austin police station, Nelys Cedeño, 48, said she had to rush her 2-year-old granddaughter Dayneli to the hospital four days ago because she was showing symptoms of pneumonia. They covered her with layers of blankets, but she said it wasn’t enough.

“The cold passes through everything,” she said in Spanish. “They are so little. It affects them more.”

Monday night, Cedeño said she had heard it was supposed to snow. It would be terrible, she said.

When someone has mild hypothermia they will start shivering, Dresden said. As the body shuts down, confusion will set in. The shivering will stop. He said severe hypothermia can cause cardiac arrest.

Michael Kurz, professor and chief of the section of emergency medicine at University of Chicago said anybody who experiences hypothermia needs to be cared for by a physician. If someone is symptomatic, he said, they should call 911 immediately. The most important preventive measure is to seek shelter or find a source of warmth.

“We will literally exhaust any resource in order to be able to accommodate citizens of our community and make sure they have what they need,” he said. “But it appears (that) the influx of migrants is rapidly outscaling the resources the city has to provide.”

Migrants at the police station in Austin said their legs were swollen from the cold. They lined up to brush their teeth in the two bathrooms available to the public — with a metallic smell, overflowing trash cans, dirty floors and tiny stream of water flowing from the sink. Migrants go to a nearby church on Tuesday and Thursday to shower, they said.

Though migrants struggled to get warm, at least one reveled in the wonder of it all.

After spending the night sleeping in a tent outside a police station in Austin, 23-year-old Paula Oliver from Venezuela stood outside the church and looked up as the sky turned itself inside out and flakes dropped onto her face — her first snow.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said in Spanish. “Look how it falls over everything.”

This is a developing story.

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