Chicago CityKeys issued

August 16, 2024

This chart shows the cumulative number of CityKeys—Chicago municipal id cards—issued by the City Clerk by year.

Texas started paying for busses to take asylum seekers to Chicago in August 2022, and tens of thousands of asylum seekers have come to Chicago since then.

Thus data comes from a couple of public records requests to the Clerk’s office.

The CityKey program exists to provide government-issued identification to all Chicago residents, regardless of immigration status. In order to protect Chicagoans, no personally identifying information is recorded in a database when the CityKey is created.

As a consequence, detailed data on the types of people who have received a CityKey is not possible to calculate because that potentially risky information is purposefully not recorded.