"Overcrowding!" the city of Waukegan declared.
"Five cars in the driveway, cots in the basement, how are you going to get them out in a fire?" Alderman Lawrence TenPas said.
"There's been horrendous neighborhood deterioration," said Newton Finn, a lawyer and Baptist minister.
The solution, as the city saw it, was to outlaw extended-family living arrangements beyond parents, children and two additional relatives.
But the U.S. Justice Department contends that the rule was enacted to limit the number of Hispanics living in the city and that the ordinance has been more strictly enforced against minorities.
"City officials repeatedly have expressed their animosity toward the new Hispanic residents of Waukegan and declared that they intended to prevent Hispanics from 'taking over,"' the Justice Department said in a complaint filed against the city last month.
City officials deny this and have refused to accept a settlement offered by the government, forcing the issue into court.
"The Justice Department has not brought to our attention any facts or statements or anything showing unevenhandedness," said Brian Grach, an attorney for the city.
In Waukegan, a blue-collar city 30 miles north of Chicago, Hispanics - almost all Mexicans - have nearly doubled in number during the past decade and now make up a quarter of the city's 69,000 residents.
Salvador Garcia, a 36-year-old bakery worker, lives in a two-story brick house with his wife and their three children. City officials who want to stem the increase of Mexican residents have targeted his home, he said.
Three months ago, he said, his children and a sister were using a basement bedroom. Inspectors told him the sister had to leave. The inspectors returned and said the children could not stay in the basement. The house has one first-floor bedroom. A second-floor apartment is rented out.
Garcia said he doesn't know why the basement bedroom could not be used.
"They don't tell me nothing," he said. "No letter ... only that you have to take upstairs your kids."
Two years ago, the city asked meter readers and others who had access to homes to report offenders. A hot line was set up to accept anonymous complaints.
A shiver of fear went through Mexican neighborhoods, said the Rev. Michael Boehm, whose Holy Family Church has a largely Hispanic congregation. Boehm and other priests contacted a Mexican legal defense group, which suggested talking with the Justice Department.
The result: months of negotiations between the city and government lawyers that collapsed when residents jammed the City Council chambers to oppose a settlement that would have cost the city $200,000 in payments to alleged victims of discrimination.
In its complaint, the government zeroed in on the extended family issue. In Waukegan, it said, 57 out of 100 Mexican homes have extended family members, while this is true in only eight of 100 non-Hispanic white homes.
City officials say the government's intervention has made matters worse.
"We had black and white problems and we worked our way through that," Alderman TenPas said. "We'd work our way through this if the feds would let us."