The Angel Family of Sheridan Gorman, murdered allegedly at the hands of an illegal alien released from the border into the United States by former President Joe Biden’s administration, is hitting back at Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) — both vocal proponents of the state’s sanctuary policy.
As Breitbart News has chronicled, 25-year-old illegal alien Jose Medina-Medina of Venezuela was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and charged with murdering Sheridan Gorman in a random attack on a pier at Chicago’s Tobey Prinz Beach.
Prosecutors say Sheridan was with a group of friends on the pier when she noticed Medina-Medina hiding. When Sheridan and others in the group started running for safety, Medina-Medina allegedly fired a gun, shooting and killing the young woman who was in her freshman year of college.
Sheridan Gorman (Photo via Facebook)
This week, Johnson was asked by a local reporter if he would apologize to Sheridan’s family for Chicago’s sanctuary city policy that shields illegal aliens from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In June 2023, Medina-Medina had been arrested for shoplifting but was never turned over to ICE agents.
Johnson lumped Sheridan’s murder in with “other folks who have lost their lives because of senseless violence” and suggested that he has nothing to do with Chicago’s sanctuary city policy.
“Let’s just be very clear, between the Safe-T Act and the welcoming city ordinance, the welcoming city ordinance was passed 40 years ago by the first Black mayor in the history of Chicago, and the Safety Act was passed under the governor at that time, who was a Republican,” Johnson said.
Likewise, Pritzker shifted blame to the Trump administration, suggesting that federal immigration agents are at fault for Sheridan’s murder.
“This has been a terrible tragedy … there have been real failures. Those failures, of course, extend beyond the borders of Illinois,” Pritzker said. “That’s their national failures, a failure to have comprehensive immigration reform, a failure of the president to follow his own edict to go after the worst of the worst.”
Now, the Gorman family is responding, seemingly calling out Johnson and Pritzker for their statements that attempt to shift blame away from Chicago and Illinois’s sanctuary policies.
“What happened to Sheridan cannot be reduced to a ‘senseless tragedy,’ nor can it be explained in general terms about public safety,” the Gorman family said in a statement to Fox News Digital:
Sheridan was our daughter. She was 18 years old. She was doing something entirely normal — walking near her campus with friends. She should be here. [Emphasis added]
Calling this ‘senseless’ is not enough. There must be a clear and honest accounting of what went wrong. We will not allow Sheridan’s life to be reduced to a talking point or a generalization. We expect leadership that is willing to confront hard truths and ensure that what happened to her does not happen again. [Emphasis added]
The Gorman family continued, saying that their daughter’s murder cannot “be explained away by broad references to failures somewhere else.”
“Sheridan was a daughter, a sister, and a young woman whose life was taken in a way that should never have been possible,” the Gorman family said. “We are not interested in political arguments or in watching responsibility shift from one place to another. If there were failures—as the Governor himself has acknowledged—then every one of them must be identified, examined, and addressed directly. The location of those failures matters less than the willingness to confront them honestly.”
“Our daughter is not a policy debate. She is a life that was taken, and that demands accountability,” the family continued.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say Medina-Medina was apprehended crossing the southern border on May 9, 2023, but was released into the U.S. interior under former President Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas’s expansive catch and release policy.
When Medina-Medina was arrested in Chicago in June 2023 for shoplifting, he had been living in taxpayer-funded housing. Even as he is charged with Sheridan’s murder, taxpayers are footing the bill for his medical treatment for tuberculosis.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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