Chicago taxpayers housed the illegal immigrant accused of killing Loyola freshman Sheridan Gorman

Jose Medina-Medina, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Venezuela, was arrested by the Chicago Police Department and charged with murdering 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman in a random attack on a pier at Chicago's Tobey Prinz Beach. He allegedly fired a gun into a group of friends who ran after noticing him hiding, shooting and killing the young woman in her freshman year of college.

Before that night, Chicago taxpayers were reportedly footing the bill for his housing.

According to the Chicago Tribune, by June 2023, Medina-Medina was living at the Leone Beach Park fieldhouse in Rogers Park, a city-sponsored shelter for migrants. That fieldhouse sat about a half mile north of where Gorman was killed.

Every Off-Ramp, Ignored

The timeline is what makes this story unbearable. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say Medina-Medina was apprehended crossing the southern border on May 9, 2023, but was released into the United States interior under former President Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas's expansive catch-and-release policy. Within weeks, he surfaced in Chicago.

By June 2023, he was arrested for shoplifting. A minor crime, but a clear signal, and more importantly, a point of contact with law enforcement. In a rational jurisdiction, that arrest would have triggered cooperation with ICE. It didn't. Chicago's strict sanctuary policy ensured Medina-Medina was not turned over to federal immigration authorities, as Breitbart reports.

So the system caught him at the border and let him go. Local police caught him stealing and let him stay. And the city gave him a roof over his head while it did so.

The Shelter Pipeline

The Leone Beach Park fieldhouse was one of scores of city-owned buildings temporarily converted into shelters for the thousands of mostly Venezuelan migrants who arrived in Chicago in 2022 and 2023. The Chicago Tribune reported that at the time of Medina-Medina's 2023 arrest:

"Members of the City Council were informed that more than 10,500 migrants had been bused to Chicago on the orders of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as part of a broader attack on the city's refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities."

Note the framing. Chicago's political class treated the arrival of illegal immigrants not as a policy consequence of their own sanctuary posture, but as an "attack" by a Republican governor. Abbott sent migrants to cities that advertised themselves as welcoming. Chicago declared itself a sanctuary. Then when the people it promised to shelter actually showed up, its leaders called it an assault.

The city could have cooperated with federal authorities at any point. It chose not to. It could have flagged Medina-Medina after his shoplifting arrest and let ICE do its job. It chose not to. Instead, it housed him, shielded him, and left him free to walk to a pier half a mile from his taxpayer-funded shelter.

A Pattern That Has Names

Sheridan Gorman is not an abstraction. She was eighteen. She was on a pier with her friends. She noticed a man hiding, and moments later she was dead.

Her name now joins a list that keeps growing. Among the most well-known cases of Americans killed at the hands of illegal immigrants released under the Biden-era catch-and-release framework:

• Laken Riley
• Jocelyn Nungaray
• Kayla Hamilton

Others include Gregori Arias, 31; James McCammon, 58; Camillia Williams, 52; Kerry Smith, 31; Samantha Dailey, 32; Anjelica Guadalupe Amaya Briceno, 20, and her three-year-old daughter; and Joselyn Jhoana Toaquiza, 21.

Every one of these deaths followed the same sequence. An illegal immigrant was encountered by federal authorities. Federal authorities released them. Local sanctuary policies blocked subsequent cooperation with ICE. Someone died.

This is not a failure of the system. The system performed exactly as designed. Catch and release was the policy. Sanctuary was the doctrine. Non-cooperation was the principle. The outcomes are not bugs. They are features of a framework that prioritizes the movement of illegal immigrants over the safety of American citizens.

Who Answers for This?

The specific cost of housing Medina-Medina has not been disclosed. But the broader expenditure is well documented: Chicago converted dozens of public facilities into migrant shelters, absorbing thousands of people the federal government released with no meaningful vetting or tracking. Taxpayers funded the shelters. Taxpayers funded the services. And when one of those sheltered individuals allegedly murdered a college freshman, taxpayers buried the cost of that, too.

Sanctuary cities operate on a theological commitment to non-cooperation with immigration enforcement. Their leaders frame this as compassion. But compassion without accountability is just negligence with better branding. You cannot simultaneously invite people the federal government failed to screen, refuse to cooperate when those people commit crimes, and then claim no responsibility when the worst happens.

Sheridan Gorman was eighteen years old and starting college. She is gone because every institution that touched Jose Medina-Medina chose to let him go.