A Chicago alderwoman apparently thinks the real victim in the murder of 18-year-old Loyola freshman Sheridan Gorman is the Venezuelan illegal alien who shot her in the back. Alderwoman Maria Hadden went on Fox 32 and suggested Gorman was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and may have “unintentionally startled” the masked gunman who was hiding behind a lighthouse at 1:30 in the morning.
Oh, we’re victim-blaming the murdered teenager now? What’s next — she was asking for it by watching the aurora borealis?
That’s what Sheridan Gorman was doing, by the way. She was an 18-year-old freshman from Yorktown, New York, out with friends at Tobey Prinz Beach in Rogers Park to watch the Northern Lights over Lake Michigan. Jose Medina-Medina, a 25-year-old Venezuelan national, was hiding behind the lighthouse on the pier. When the students spotted him and ran, he shot Gorman in the back. She died.
Medina’s backstory reads like a checklist of every failure in the system that Maria Hadden and her friends built. He was caught by Border Patrol in May 2023 and released under Biden. Two months later, he was arrested for shoplifting at the Macy’s on State Street. Released again. Stopped showing up to court. Nobody went looking for him. And when he was finally arrested for murder, he missed his first court hearing because he has tuberculosis.
(A Venezuelan illegal with TB who murders college students. Somewhere, a DHS press officer just spit out his coffee.)
Now here’s what Hadden did when the backlash hit. She didn’t apologize for what she said. She apologized that her comments “went viral on conservative media” and “landed wrong with some people.” Landed wrong with some people! Sheridan Gorman’s parents just buried their daughter, and this woman thinks the problem is Fox News.
The Gorman family said what everybody else was thinking: “This was not random misfortune. This was a violent and preventable act.”
Preventable. That’s the word that’s going to haunt Illinois Democrats for the rest of the election cycle.
Because look at the math. Eleven out of fourteen Illinois House Democrats voted against the Laken Riley Act — the law that would have required ICE to detain illegal immigrants arrested for shoplifting. Jose Medina was arrested for shoplifting. Under that law, ICE would have had him. Sheridan Gorman would be alive. Nine of those eleven Democrats won’t even pick up the phone to explain their vote now.
This is Laken Riley 2.0, and everyone knows it. Same profile: Venezuelan national. Caught at the border, released. Prior arrest for theft. Killed a young college student. The only difference is that Democrats already got caught flat-footed once on this exact story — and they voted against the law that was specifically designed to prevent it from happening again.
Even senator John Fetterman (D-PA) — a guy who had a stroke and still has more political sense than the entire Illinois delegation — went after his own party. “Why can’t we just acknowledge this is a serious, serious failure… it’s devastating as a father,” he said. When your own team is calling you out, you’ve got a problem.
But here’s where this goes from a bad week to a structural problem for Illinois Democrats. Governor Pritzker is positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run. He just spent the Illinois Senate primary flexing his political muscle, backing candidates and testing anti-ICE messaging with Democratic voters. His response to Sheridan Gorman’s murder? Accuse Trump of “politicizing” it.
That play worked in 2023. It’s not going to work now.
The polling has already shifted. A survey showed 46% of Chicago-area voters wanted to end sanctuary city status — and that was before Sheridan Gorman. The TRUST Act, Illinois’s sanctuary law that literally makes it illegal for cops to honor ICE detainers, was already unpopular with minority voters. Now it has a body attached to it. Not an abstraction. Not a policy debate. An 18-year-old girl shot in the back while watching the Northern Lights.
Mark my words: the TRUST Act is going to become the single most toxic piece of legislation in Illinois politics. Every Republican challenger in every swing district in the state is going to run ads with Sheridan Gorman’s name and the phrase “voted to keep her killer on the streets.” The eleven Democrats who voted no on the Laken Riley Act can’t uncast that vote. And Pritzker’s “stop politicizing it” line is going to age like milk in a dumpster.
(Want to know how you can tell a Democrat knows they’re in trouble? They accuse you of “politicizing” the thing they politicized first.)
Sheridan Gorman was watching the Northern Lights with her friends. She was 18 years old. She had the future that every parent hopes for their kid. And Maria Hadden, the alderwoman for the ward where it happened, went on television and said the girl startled her own killer.
If Illinois Democrats don’t start losing elections over this, it won’t be because voters aren’t paying attention. It’ll be because the party has stopped pretending to care.