When a local tragedy demands answers

Brett Freeman

The murder of Sheridan Gorman — a Yorktown High School graduate killed in Chicago — isn’t a distant headline for our readers. It’s a name they recognize, a family they know, a grief that needs no explanation.

That kind of loss demands honesty from a community newspaper.

Sheridan's family has already modeled the kind of directness I'm trying to follow. They have said, plainly, that the system failed her. They have pushed back on attempts to frame her death as a "senseless tragedy" — a phrase that implies randomness where there was, in fact, a chain of decisions. They have challenged the responses of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker by name, arguing that those responses obscured rather than confronted what actually happened.

I think the Gormans are right. And I think that chain is worth examining carefully.

In the days after Sheridan's death, I wrote a brief note mentioning the immigration status of the alleged killer. A reader told me I was repeating "Trump's pandering propaganda."

This comment deserves a real response.

When critics of immigration enforcement respond to concerns about immigration and crime, they often cite a familiar claim: research shows that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. It gets stated as settled science. It isn't.

The studies behind that claim draw primarily from Texas Department of Public Safety data, one of the only states that systematically tracks immigration status in criminal cases, covering roughly 2012 to 2022. That data is real and shouldn't be dismissed. But it is still one state. And extending its findings to a confident national conclusion requires shaky assumptions.

The limitations compound from there. The most recent extensions of this data still predate the full scope of the Biden-era border surge and the policy environment we're actually debating. In cities and states with sanctuary policies, where cooperation with federal immigration enforcement is deliberately withheld, we have almost no reliable tracking at all. That's not incidental. It's the predictable consequence of policies designed to limit data collection.

The effective collapse of border enforcement during the Biden administration didn't just allow economic migrants to enter unchecked. It created conditions that were actively exploited, with documented consequences.

Federal law enforcement and congressional testimony have confirmed that members of Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan transnational criminal organization, entered the United States during the border surge and established a presence across multiple American cities. The vetting failures were not incidental; they were structural. A system processing millions of encounters and releasing people into the interior on notices to appear had neither the capacity nor, in many cases, the mandate to screen adequately for criminal history or gang affiliation.

The result was predictable: people who should never have been admitted were released into American communities. Some had violent histories in their home countries that our system never identified. Others were affiliated with organizations whose entire purpose is predatory violence.

This is a serious and documented policy failure. The Biden Administration's own internal assessments acknowledged the problem even as official messaging minimized it. The question that deserves an answer, and hasn't gotten one, is why a system that knew it was overwhelmed continued operating as though it wasn't.

This debate isn't happening somewhere else. It's being shaped, right now, by people our readers know.

State Sen. Pete Harckham attended the vigil for Sheridan Gorman. I don't question why he was there. He is, by all accounts, a person of genuine decency, and a grieving community deserved the presence of its elected representatives.

But presence is not the same as leadership on this issue.

Senator Harckham has supported the New York for All Act, legislation that would substantially limit how state and local agencies cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Its sponsors have clear and sincere intentions: to protect immigrant communities from what they view as overreaching federal power, to reduce fear, and to build trust between immigrant residents and local law enforcement.

I'll grant the strongest version of that argument. If people are afraid to interact with police, crime goes unreported and communities become less safe. If enforcement is perceived as indiscriminate, it corrodes the institutional trust that effective governance depends on. These concerns are not invented. They reflect real experiences that real people have had.

But good intentions and real consequences are not the same thing. And the question worth asking is whether this particular solution introduces risks as serious as the ones it's meant to solve.

Policies that limit state-federal cooperation necessarily make it harder to identify, detain, and remove people who are here illegally, including people who have already had contact with the criminal justice system. Supporters of these policies draw a clean line between serious criminal offenses and civil immigration violations. In theory, the line holds.

In practice, it doesn't, because the cases that become tragedies rarely announce themselves as serious in advance. They begin with minor contact. A low-level arrest. A release. Another release. A system that, at each decision point, treats the civil violation as someone else's problem.

We have just watched that sequence play out with Sheridan's alleged killer, Jose Medina, a Venezuelan national who was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol in May 2023 and released. He was later arrested for shoplifting that same year, and then released again. So, it's fair to ask whether Medina would have also fallen through the cracks in New York under the New York for All Act.

Here is my question for Senator Harckham, and what I believe voters in this district deserve to hear answered: If New York moves further toward limiting enforcement cooperation, what replaces it? What mechanism ensures that individuals who've already been in contact with law enforcement don't cycle back into communities without consequence? And when that process fails, as it has failed, who is accountable?

These are not rhetorical traps. They are the questions that determine whether a policy is serious.

With reports that Yorktown Deputy Supervisor Sergio Esposito may challenge Senator Harckham this cycle, our readers may soon hear these competing visions argued directly. Good. That's how it should work.

On the national stage, there is a funding battle with the Department of Homeland Security. New York's representatives play an outsize role in this debate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has argued that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should not receive full funding without significant reforms: stricter warrant requirements, restrictions on enforcement near "sensitive locations," a ban on agents wearing face coverings and expanded oversight. These are presented as guardrails.

But Schumer's specific proposals raise questions that don't get asked often enough. Unmasking agents in the field? What does that mean for officer safety? Expanding the list of off-limits enforcement zones? What happens to cases that fall within them? Tying funding to compliance? What fills the gap while reforms are negotiated? These aren't hypotheticals designed to score points. They're the operational realities that determine whether a policy works in practice or only in principle.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who grew up in Yorktown, goes further. She has argued that ICE, as currently structured, should cease to exist — replaced by something that focuses narrowly on serious criminal offenses while stepping back from broader civil immigration enforcement.

That is at least an honest position. It names what it wants.

But it leaves the hardest question unanswered: in the system she envisions, who enforces immigration law and how? What happens when someone enters illegally, is encountered by authorities, and falls outside whatever narrow enforcement mandate remains? Every serious reform proposal eventually has to answer that. This one hasn't, at least not clearly.

What we're left with, across both approaches, is a set of proposals that constrain enforcement without clearly strengthening it, and a broader political environment in which "reform" increasingly functions as a synonym for retreat.

This is not an abstraction.

Laken Riley, 22, beaten to death while jogging on her college campus in Georgia. Rachel Morin, 37, raped and murdered on a trail in Maryland. Jocelyn Nungaray, 12 years old, sexually assaulted and strangled in Houston. In each case, the victim was a young woman doing something ordinary — walking, jogging, living her life. In each case, the perpetrator was a removable noncitizen who had already been encountered by the system and released back into the country.

And now we have Sheridan Gorman, 18, shot in the back while walking with friends in Chicago. There have been no public statements or expressions of condolences from either Schumer or Ocasio-Cortez. Why is that?

Most immigrants come to this country to build better lives. Many do, and they make our communities stronger in the process, including communities like ours. That is worth saying clearly, and I mean it.

But a system that refuses to draw lines, enforce them, and take responsibility when it fails isn't compassionate. It's negligent. And when that negligence has a name, when it shows up at a vigil in Yorktown, in a family that has to fight just to have the truth acknowledged — we don't get to look away.