Joliet council members condemn heated public rhetoric, threats in recent weeks

Council members called for moments of silence three times at a Joliet City Council meeting where a controversy over asylum-seeker services continued to boil and the murder of a 6-year-old Muslim boy served as an example of rage gone too far.

“We’d be foolish to think something like this couldn’t happen here in Joliet,” council member Cesar Guerrero said, referring to the stabbing attack that killed Wadea Al-Fayoume and severely injured his mother Saturday in Plainfield Township.

Guerrero was the first of three to call for moments of silence at the Tuesday council meeting as he asked those who “believe in peace” to join him.

He also pointed to threats of violence in the controversy surrounding an $8.6 million state grant for asylum-seeker services that Joliet Township abandoned amid intense community opposition.

Guerrero said some people were calling out, “Shoot them,” when one speaker at a Joliet Township board meeting last week made complaints about asylum-seekers already in Joliet.

He also became the second council member to say that the Will-Grundy Medical Clinic, one of the proposed beneficiaries of the grant because of services already being provided asylum-seekers, has been the victim of threats.

Council member Suzanna Ibarra last week issued a statement saying the clinic had been the target of threats and made her own call for non-violence.

The threat was a phone call made by what appeared by his voice an older man, said Alicia Morales, first vice president of the Will-Grundy Medical Clinic board and the township clerk in Joliet Township.

“The clinic better keep asylum-seekers out of the clinic, and it better stay that way,” the caller said, according to Morales. “We don’t want them here,” he added, according to Morales.

While the caller did not make any specific threat of violence, tensions are running high given the number of attacks occurring in the nation over the past few years spurred by anti-immigrant or religious motives.

The slaughter of Wadea Al-Fayoume with repeated stabbings — the family’s 71-year-old landlord and neighbor has been charged in the crime — has become the latest national example of violence related to national political issues or international conflicts.

Council member Larry Hug was the second council member on Tuesday to call for a moment of silence and did so on behalf of Wadea Al-Fayoume.

Ibarra, who talked of her own sister-in-law several years ago having been stabbed to death in Plainfield not far from where Al-Fayoume was killed, was the third council member calling for a moment of silence “for all victims and that young boy.”

The calls for reflection and peace come as a couple of council members, including Hug, are pushing a hot-button proposal to declare Joliet a non-sanctuary city.

Joliet is not a sanctuary city, a designation that some cities have chosen to declare a hands-off approach to enforcement of national immigration issues.

In the aftermath of the controversy over the asylum grant, which included a plan to create four welcome centers for asylum seekers, council member Joe Clement has proposed a declaration that Joliet is not a sanctuary city to make the city’s stance clear.

“I’m trying to stand up for the people of Joliet,” Clement said, noting that the thousands of asylum-seekers being bussed into the Chicago area. “Other cities said they’re sanctuary cities. They rolled out the red carpet. Now they’re rolling it up.”

Council member Cesar Cardenas, however, said such a statement could send a threatening message to the large immigrant population already in Joliet and questioned the need for such a message to asylum-seekers.

“If they’re looking at communities that identify themselves as sanctuary cities, we’ve never done that in Joliet,” Cardenas said. “I think we should leave it at that.”.