This project emerges from our participation in volunteer efforts to assist some of the nearly 42,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022. Through ethnographic research, legal case study, and oral history, we seek to record and analyze the experiences of both arriving and receiving communities. We will interview asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants as well as volunteers, city workers, and activists. We will observe the formal and informal contexts where community emerges, or fails to emerge. Interviews and observations will help us identify the intersections of municipal policies such as the “Welcoming City” platform and international law, including asylum and refugee conventions, and investigate the barriers that emerge unexpectedly therein. We will seek to capture a dramatic change in the South Side of Chicago, as it grapples with a large, rapid migration from the Global South. Studying Chicago at this moment of change, we will ask: How do new neighbors and locals define “shelter,” “refuge,” and “asylum”? How do they narrate their positionality in historical and geopolitical contexts? How do they experience barriers and opportunities in the swiftly changing neighborhood? To present our findings, we propose to undertake a collaborative research paper as well as conferences and presentations. A gallery exhibition called Imagining the Sanctuary City will enhance our research with visual and textual primary sources.