- Brazilian student Joabe Barbosa is nearing completion of 4,000 miles running every single street in Chicago.
- His F-1 student visa is expiring, threatening his legal status despite becoming a beloved local community figure.
- A final celebratory run is planned for June 14 to mark the end of his citywide journey.
(CHICAGO, ILLINOIS) — Joabe Barbosa set out to run every street in Chicago and, as he nears the end of a journey across approximately 4,000 miles, the 25-year-old Brazilian graduate student at Roosevelt University now faces having to leave the United States when his student visa expires.
Barbosa, who is pursuing a clinical doctorate in psychology, became widely known in Chicago after he began the project in August 2024. His goal was sweeping and simple: cover the city’s 77 neighborhoods and more than 2,000 streets on foot.
He has completed about 80-85% of the streets, building a public following as he moves through the city. His expiring visa now threatens both his stay in the U.S. and the completion of the challenge that turned him into a familiar figure far beyond the running community.
Barbosa arrived in Chicago in 2022. Two years later, he began mapping the city in a grid-based zig-zag method, taking on blocks piece by piece rather than chasing scenic routes or landmark miles.
The routine has been punishing. He averages 10 miles daily, six days a week, or up to 120 miles weekly, a volume that has carried him through neighborhood after neighborhood and made the project as much an act of endurance as a public performance.
Many of those runs began from CTA stations, giving the effort a transit map logic as well as a runner’s rhythm. Along the way, Barbosa posted his progress on Instagram, where he has more than 43,000 followers, and on Strava, turning a solitary athletic challenge into a running diary followed by thousands.
What grew around the project was larger than mileage. Barbosa began hosting open group runs every Sunday, and those outings helped create a loose but visible community that crossed neighborhood lines.
Residents cheered from stoops or joined him for stretches of the route. His runs also brought him into contact with a wide range of Chicagoans, including people recently released from prison, and the project came to carry a message about contact across places that are often reduced to shorthand or stereotype.
That community element sits at the center of Barbosa’s public image. His run through Chicago has been described as an answer to neighborhood stereotypes, built less on speeches than on repeated presence, footfalls, introductions and return visits.
He has said, “Chicago chose me,” a line that has come to define how many supporters see the relationship between the runner and the city. For admirers, the project is not simply about checking off streets but about respect across communities that might otherwise remain distant from one another.
Barbosa’s profile rose further through feats outside the street-running challenge itself. He set a Guinness World Record for the fastest visit to all 146 CTA ‘L’ stations, another city-spanning test of planning, stamina and speed.
He also delivered a TEDx talk titled “The Truth I Found (So Far) Running Every Street in Chicago.” In that talk, he shared a narrative of resilience rooted in a near-fatal mountain injury that later sparked his running rehab.
That backstory gave the Chicago project another layer. The miles were not only about exploration or notoriety, but also about recovery, with the city becoming the setting for a longer personal rebuilding process.
His public presence, in turn, made him more than a runner logging distance. Barbosa became a local celebrity, a figure supporters tracked online and encountered in person, and a symbol of motion across a city often discussed in fragments rather than as a whole.
Now the legal reality attached to his immigration status has overtaken the feel-good arc of the challenge. Barbosa faces deportation after his student visa expires, even as his local visibility has grown and his route toward the finish has narrowed.
His F-1 student status is tied to his doctoral program. That connection means his place in the United States remains bound to the rules governing his studies, regardless of the public recognition attached to his running project.
Reports on March 31, 2026, said the visa problem could force him to leave the country. The timing places an immigration hurdle directly in the path of a challenge that had begun to feel, for many followers, like a civic celebration in progress.
That tension has sharpened the public response to Barbosa’s story. He is at once a graduate student, an immigrant and an endurance athlete whose project has drawn support from people across Chicago, and the possibility of departure reframes the final miles as uncertain rather than triumphant.
For Chicagoans who have watched the challenge unfold in real time, the threat reaches beyond one runner’s plans. Barbosa’s weekly movement through the city has helped generate recurring encounters between residents and neighborhoods that do not often share the same social orbit.
His project has inspired Chicagoans in part because it made the city legible through effort. Instead of treating neighborhoods as abstractions, Barbosa entered them repeatedly, logged them, photographed them and invited others to run with him.
That process helped build cross-community respect, a theme repeatedly attached to the challenge as it gained attention. The idea was not that Chicago’s divisions disappeared, but that a person moving block by block could challenge assumptions by showing up.
The looming possibility that Barbosa may have to leave the country raises questions about what happens to that momentum if the project is interrupted. His runs have functioned as both athletic achievement and public gathering point, and the loss would register in both spaces.
Yet the challenge itself still has a visible endpoint on the calendar. Barbosa plans a final celebratory run on June 14 from Oak and Michigan to Buckingham Fountain, and he has invited the public to join.
The planned finale suggests a communal ending rather than a private last lap. It also fits the way the project has unfolded from the start: in public, in motion and with other people drawn into its path.
By the numbers alone, the effort stands apart. Few undertakings ask one person to traverse approximately 4,000 miles street by street, and fewer still turn that physical grind into a citywide social ritual.
Barbosa did so while balancing graduate study at Roosevelt University and the demands of a doctoral path in psychology. The project’s scale, coupled with the discipline required to sustain 10 miles daily for six days a week, made his progress hard to ignore.
Chicago embraced that scale through its own geography. The city’s 77 neighborhoods and over 2,000 streets offered Barbosa a framework large enough to test him and familiar enough for residents to feel part of the route.
Supporters followed because they could locate themselves in the challenge. A station, a block, a corner or a neighborhood was never far from the map he was building.
That is part of what made Barbosa’s rise feel distinct. He was not passing through Chicago as a visitor chasing a stunt, but moving through it slowly enough for people to recognize him, speak with him and attach their own neighborhood pride to his progress.
His immigration problem now places that public connection against the limits of student status. Fame does not alter visa rules, and a city’s affection does not by itself resolve an expiring authorization to stay.
What remains is a finish line, a community and an unresolved deadline. If Barbosa reaches Buckingham Fountain on June 14, the run will mark the end of a challenge that turned one student from Roosevelt University into a symbol of how a city can be stitched together, mile by mile, before an immigration clock runs out.
