Jessica Gorman told Congress this summer that her 18-year-old daughter, Sheridan Gorman, was killed in Chicago after a chain of immigration and police decisions left Jose Medina in the city. She said the killing was not a mystery or a sudden break from the record, but the last step in a sequence that began at the border in May 2023.
The hearing drew attention because Gorman was not speaking about a policy dispute in the abstract. She was speaking as a mother about a daughter who, she said, made room for other children from the time she was in kindergarten, watching the school’s buddy bench at recess and hurrying over to pull lonely children away to play. Gorman said Sheridan was the kind of girl who made people feel seen, adding that if someone felt invisible, Sheridan saw them.
That personal account landed in a chamber already focused on sanctuary policies. Rep. Pramila Jayapal said it was the fourth hearing on the issue, while Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker continued to back the policies that limit information sharing with federal immigration agents. Gorman used her testimony to argue that the system failed her daughter and to press the case that Chicago should not have been cut off from federal enforcement information when Jose Medina moved through it.
The timeline Gorman laid out was blunt. Medina illegally crossed into Texas in May 2023 and was encountered by the U.S. Border Patrol near the border. He said he did not fear persecution if deported, was released into the United States, and was bused to Chicago. One month later, he was arrested on shoplifting charges at Macy’s. Chicago police did not notify ICE when he was arrested, then released him. After Medina failed to appear in court, Chicago issued a warrant for his arrest, but the city did not notify ICE about the active warrant.
That gap is where the story turns. Medina’s warrant was still active in March when he allegedly shot Sheridan in the back of the neck as she fled him and the gun he brandished on a Lake Michigan pier while she and her friends were there to photograph the Northern Lights. Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden suggested Sheridan was in the wrong place at the wrong time and may have startled her killer, a line that sharpened the argument over blame and made the Gorman family’s view of the case clearer: they see a preventable death, not an accident of geography.
For Jessica Gorman, the testimony was meant to force that question into the open. The hearing did not resolve why Chicago officials did not notify ICE after Medina’s arrest or after the warrant was issued. It did, however, put the city’s sanctuary rules and the consequences of silence at the center of a death that the family says should never have happened.
