Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has decided that the best response to a brutal murder allegedly committed by an illegal immigrant in his sanctuary city is to blame President Trump. The victim, 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman, was killed during a walk along the Chicago lakeshore, and the suspect is Jose Medina-Medina, a Venezuelan who had been arrested for shoplifting in Chicago back in 2023 but was released instead of being handed over to immigration authorities . Rather than reckon with the consequences of Chicago’s sanctuary policies, Pritzker is pointing his finger at the federal government.
“It is the job of the federal government to go after immigration enforcement,” Pritzker told media outlets , which is rich coming from a man who has spent years denouncing Trump’s deportation policies and defending the very sanctuary laws that prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. The same governor who has fought tooth and nail to keep Chicago an amnesty zone, who has proudly stood in the way of federal immigration enforcement, now wants to pretend that it’s Trump’s fault when an illegal immigrant his policies protected ends up killing a college student in his city. And Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is playing the same game, trying to dodge responsibility by pointing out that the Welcoming City ordinance was passed forty years ago and that a Republican governor once signed a related bill.
As if the age of a bad policy or the party affiliation of a politician from years past somehow absolves the current Democratic leadership of their active, enthusiastic enforcement of sanctuary policies today. Johnson even had the audacity to claim that “if there is anything to address in this country that’s illegal, it’s everything about the Trump administration,” as reported by local news sources . But the murder of a teenager by someone who shouldn’t have been in the country at all is apparently less concerning to him than the administration trying to enforce immigration laws.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. Medina-Medina was arrested for shoplifting in Chicago. Under normal circumstances, that arrest would have triggered a detainer request from ICE, and he would have been transferred to federal custody for deportation proceedings . But Chicago is a sanctuary city, with laws explicitly designed to prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. So he was released. He stayed in the country illegally. And now an 18-year-old girl is dead.
The Democratic Party’s response to this tragedy isn’t introspection or a reconsideration of policies that clearly failed to protect their own citizens. It’s deflection. It’s blame-shifting. It’s pretending that the problem isn’t the open borders and sanctuary policies they championed, but rather the administration that is trying to clean up the mess those policies created. Pritzker and Johnson are betting that their constituents are too distracted or too partisan to connect the dots between their sanctuary city rhetoric and the body count piling up in Chicago.
This is the same playbook Democrats have been running for years. When crime spikes in their cities, it’s the fault of Republicans for not passing gun control. When illegal immigrants commit violent crimes after being released from sanctuary jurisdictions, it’s the fault of Republicans for not doing enough immigration enforcement, even as Democrats actively obstruct that very enforcement at every turn. There is no scenario in which Democratic policies can ever be held responsible for their predictable consequences. There is always someone else to blame.
The irony of Pritzker claiming that immigration enforcement is the federal government’s job while his city actively prevents federal agents from doing that job is apparently lost on him. You cannot simultaneously declare your jurisdiction off-limits to immigration enforcement and then complain that the federal government isn’t doing enough immigration enforcement. Well, you can, apparently, if you’re a Democratic politician with a friendly media ecosystem that won’t call out the contradiction.
Sheridan Gorman deserved better than to become another statistic in the ongoing catastrophe of America’s broken immigration system. She deserved a city that would prioritize her safety over the comfort of illegal immigrants. She deserved leaders who would take responsibility when their policies failed her instead of immediately searching for a political enemy to scapegoat. What she got instead was a sanctuary city that released her alleged killer and politicians who can’t even muster the decency to acknowledge their role in the tragedy.
The Trump administration was elected with a mandate to secure the border and deport illegal immigrants, precisely because Americans are tired of seeing stories like this one. They’re tired of watching Democratic politicians prioritize the interests of people who entered the country illegally over the safety of their own citizens. And they’re especially tired of being told that the resulting violence is somehow their fault for wanting the laws enforced.
Providence watches over the bold.
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