Slain student's parents call immigration enforcement a bipartisan duty

On a Friday afternoon in May, the parents of an eighteen-year-old college student stood before a crowd at a Trump rally in Suffern, New York, and told the story of a system that failed them at every turn. Sheridan Gorman had been killed on March 19 in Chicago, shot by a man she encountered while walking with friends along a lakefront pier at Tobey Prinz Beach. The man who killed her, Jose Medina, was twenty-five years old and in the country illegally, having entered from Venezuela. What made the Gormans' grief sharper than the ordinary tragedy of losing a child was the knowledge that Medina should never have been free to encounter their daughter at all.

The Department of Homeland Security later confirmed that Medina had been released from custody twice despite an active Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer. In 2023, Border Patrol apprehended him and let him go. Later that same year, he was arrested again—this time for shoplifting—and released once more. Each time the system had a chance to hold him, it didn't. Medina was charged with first-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty, but the Gormans' anger was not directed at him alone. It was directed at the officials and policies they believed had handed their daughter's killer his freedom.

Jessica Gorman, Sheridan's mother, spoke at the rally with the careful precision of someone who has rehearsed her pain into words. "At every step the system had a chance to stop him," she said. "At every step, it failed. And my daughter paid for those failures with her life." She described the unbearable specificity of her loss: the not knowing whether Sheridan had called for her in her final moments, the image of her daughter alone and bleeding on cold pavement. The Gormans had become unwilling experts in immigration policy, release procedures, sanctuary laws, and enforcement breakdowns—knowledge no parent should need to acquire.

What deepened the family's sense of betrayal was the timing of a gesture by Chicago's mayor, Brandon Johnson, a vocal critic of Trump. Days after Sheridan's death, Johnson unveiled a snowplow bearing the words "Abolish ICE." Jessica Gorman later described the moment as more than infuriating. "When they're naming trucks and laughing and joking several days after our daughter was murdered, we're waiting in Chicago to claim her body," she said. The vitriol she felt was, by her own account, overwhelming.

At the rally, Tom Gorman, Sheridan's father, thanked Trump and then made a deliberate pivot. He said he did not understand why protecting children from preventable violence should belong to only one political party. "Protecting our people is not politics," he said. "It is the first responsibility of government." His framing was careful: he was not asking for partisan victory. He was asking for bipartisan acknowledgment that sanctuary policies had consequences, and that those consequences had a name—Sheridan.

The rally itself seemed to offer the Gormans something they had been without since March. Sheridan's sister, Madelon, spoke briefly and said something that captured the weight of their months: her family had laughed more and smiled more in the past hour than they had since the day her sister died. It was a small mercy, and it was all the rally could offer—a moment of relief in a grief that would not end, a public platform for a private devastation, and the knowledge that their daughter's death had become evidence in a larger argument about how a nation should govern itself.