Background: The United States does not have a comprehensive, publicly funded early care and education (ECE) system. As a result, disparities in access and participation in quality ECE in the U.S. are well-documented. Low and middle-income families participate less frequently in ECE compared with higher-income families, often due to conflicts with work hours, cost, or limited options near where they live (Harding & Paulsell, 2018). Enrollment rates in high-quality ECE also tend to be lower for families in racial/ethnic minoritized groups (NCES, 2023). Latinx immigrant families and dual language learners (DLLs) experience a shortage of affordable and quality care in their communities (Malik et al., 2016; Pacheco-Applegate et al., 2020). In response, many states and cities have invested in universal prekindergarten (UPK), where spending has tripled over the past two decades (Friedman-Krauss et al., 2023). UPK targets "universality," seeking to expand preschool access and participation for families who have historically lacked affordable and quality options. While investments in UPK have shown promise, progress has been uneven. Recent UPK initiatives across major cities see similar trends of disparate access across language and socioeconomic status (Latham et al., 2021; McCormick et al., 2023). We continue to know little about if and how families experience these potential inequities from their perspectives. Purpose: The documented disparities have called for new approaches to improve our understanding of UPK (Haskins & Brooks-Gunn, 2016; Weiland et al., 2022). This paper sought to understand mechanisms of (in)equitable access and explore possible pathways forward using in-depth qualitative interviews with English- and Spanish-speaking caregivers of preschool-aged children across Chicago who were experiencing the roll-out of UPK in their neighborhoods. The collection of qualitative data is a strategic approach to understanding the lived experiences of policy and uncovering more nuanced mechanisms of long-established outcomes: What are the barriers and opportunities associated with participation in Chicago UPK, from caregiver perspectives? Do these barriers and opportunities differ across family socioeconomic characteristics, specifically income and language status? Setting: This paper was part of a larger mixed-methods study at Northwestern University in collaboration with the Mayor, Department of Family and Support Services, and Chicago Public School (CPS). The larger study asks whether Chicago's model meets the goal of expanding access to high-quality preschool for all Chicago families. Chicago is one of the most racially and economically segregated cities in the U.S., suffering from concentrated poverty among Black and Latinx families -- the two largest minoritized groups in the city. For these reasons, Chicago's UPK roll-out creates an opportunity to dig deep into the mechanisms of (in)equitable access and participation. Program: Chicago rolled their UPK program in 2019, hoping to combat existing inequity in ECE access to provide full-day slots for all 4-year-olds by 2023. Chicago's UPK model was designed to increase access and quality by saturating historically marginalized communities before moving on to the rest of the city. The implementation utilized a mixed delivery system that included school-based UPK within CPS and pre-existing community-based organizations (CBOs) eligible for government subsidies, a common method for rapid expansion thought to be cost-effective and promotes caregiver choice. Participants: Participants included 30 English- and 20 Spanish-speaking primary caregivers of 3-5-year-old children across Chicago who were enrolled in preschool, either through Chicago's UPK system or privately. In addition to language, participants were purposefully sampled across socioeconomic status, neighborhood, and preschool type. Data Collection/Analysis: The author conducted in-depth qualitative interviews between 60-90 minutes and a structured online demographic survey between May and October 2023. The interviews gauged caregivers' experience of ECE in Chicago and their perspectives on the UPK roll-out. Although COVID-19 was not essential to the research questions, interviews allowed space for caregivers to discuss how the pandemic influenced the various aspects of their lives related to the UPK roll-out. Interview transcripts were analyzed using a Flexible Coding approach, a method for analyzing in-depth and larger-scale interview data with qualitative data analysis software (QDA) that entails a combination of induction and literature- or theory-based coding (Deterding & Waters, 2021). Interviews were examined using the QDA program "Dedoose" and in ongoing collaboration with the larger research team consisting of bilingual faculty, graduate and undergraduate research assistants. The demographic survey was used to reveal how socioeconomic and language status created opportunities for heterogeneous experiences of Chicago UPK. Procedures for cross-language research have been incorporated into all parts of the research process through collaboration with bilingual Northwestern faculty and students who have experience working with Spanish-speaking families in Chicago and expertise in research in multilingual early childhood contexts. This was done to ensure accuracy, quality, and completeness, and to conduct culturally competent research (Erhard et al., 2021; Fryer, 2019). Findings: Participants described a complexity of choice within Chicago's UPK system across socioeconomic indicators. Many caregivers found satisfaction with Chicago UPK. Other caregivers described difficulty in accessing the free program. For these families, the expansion of choice intended in a mixed-delivery system appeared to have the opposite effect, reinforcing many of the barriers experienced in ECE access more broadly. Families who were experiencing resource instability often chose to pay for care, while middle- and high-income families had the privilege of free care through UPK. For example, despite having free options nearby, caregivers' choices were limited by other more immediate concerns around trust, safety, or lack of accessibility of information. Thus, many caregivers described making an active choice to pay for preschool, even if money was low. The decision-making process for more privileged families was less loaded, where caregivers made childcare decisions that fit their long-term needs, which often meant enrollment in Chicago's UPK initiative. Conclusion: These preliminary findings mirror interconnected barriers documented for families accessing ECE more broadly and evidence that low-income families tend to pay disproportionately more on childcare (Greenberg et al., 2016; Smith & Gozjolko, 2010). Additionally, analyses will further explore the ways Chicago's UPK policy may promote (in)equitable access and participation across language status; the inclusion of Latinx participants in this study addresses the lack of Latinx voices in academic research due to language barriers or limited data collection resources.