America’s “sanctuary” communities claim to possess higher levels of compassion for others, but the reality is that the measure of a human life in these places has quietly been assigned a hierarchical value based on immigration status. By the logic of sanctuary laws, illegal aliens’ lives have the highest value, while those of American citizens have virtually none.
The most recent example is the case of Sheridan Gorman, an 18-year-old Loyola University freshman who was gunned down in Chicago this month.
Gorman’s alleged killer, Jose Medina-Medina, a Venezuelan national who entered illegally under the Biden administration’s catch-and-release policy, was apprehended at the southern border in May 2023, released into the country, then arrested again for shoplifting in Chicago just weeks later. He was set free once more because the city’s sanctuary policies barred cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
In this twisted moral calculus, the importance of shielding an illegal alien from the deportation he deserves outweighs safeguarding an American teenager’s right to walk safely in her own city. Sanctuary advocates preach empathy for the “undocumented,” yet their policies create a ranking of worth: the lives of U.S. citizens like Gorman become collateral in the pursuit of ideological virtue and are expendable when they collide with the protected status of those who crossed the border unlawfully.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker own this tragedy. Their sanctuary mandates—local and state rules that bar cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—directly enabled Medina-Medina’s second release. Johnson’s Chicago and Pritzker’s Illinois treat illegal aliens as a protected class, even after arrests for crimes like theft. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has now lodged a detainer, pleading with them not to free this alleged killer again. If the pattern holds, Chicago will refuse to cooperate in removing him, consistent with Mayor Johnson’s warped sense of justice
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