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This summer, senior producer Robin Aimer and I went to a park in South East Chicago.

I am a user porter.

And on that day in this park, children were playing.

We were standing under a tree and birds were chirping.

We talked about the parakeets.

Let's get the monk parakeets too. You hear those?

Oh, were the parakeets here? I thought they were just in Hyde Park.

And everyone admired the day.

But in the distance, you could hear diesel trucks rumbling on the avenue that leads into the industrial site where this facility would be located.

I'm not kidding you driving through this is so difficult. It's like playing frogger.

You're literally trying to get between diesel trucks.

How can you tell us someone are youth to go out there and ride their bike when there's diesel trucks on the road continuously?

That's Darrell Fears. He reports on environmental justice for the post.

And he has spent much of this year looking into this fight in Chicago.

The city allowed a metal shredding company with a bad track record of pollution

to move from a well off white neighborhood to a working class Latino neighborhood.

I wondered how could that be done and I wondered what the Biden administration, which had vowed to intervene and scrutinize situations like this, would do.

From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Martin Powers. It's Tuesday, December 14th.

Today, we're taking a look at how a battle over a scrap metal facility on the southeast side of Chicago is a test case for the Biden administration on environmental justice.

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