On March 19, Sheridan Grace Gorman — an 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman from Yorktown Heights, New York — was walking on a pier near campus in Rogers Park with friends. They'd gone out hoping to see the northern lights. A masked man approached the group and opened fire.
Sheridan didn't come home.
The man charged with her murder, Jose Medina-Medina, is a 25-year-old Venezuelan national who entered the country illegally. He had previous contact with law enforcement but was released under Chicago's sanctuary city policies. As Jessica Gorman, Sheridan's mother, later told Congress: "A 10-second phone call to ICE could have saved my daughter's life."
That testimony came on June 30, before a House Judiciary subcommittee on Capitol Hill. Jessica Gorman stood in front of federal lawmakers and said what every grieving parent in her position has said, in different words, for years: "My beautiful 18-year-old daughter was murdered in cold blood by a man who never should have been in this country."
Governor Kathy Hochul had already heard this story. The Gorman family had been in the news for months. President Trump brought them on stage at a rally in Suffern, New York on May 22. Tom Gorman, Sheridan's father, told the crowd: "I'm a husband who had to hold his wife on Mother's Day when she asked the question no mother should ever have to ask."
Five days later, on May 27, Hochul signed the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act.
The law prohibits 287(g) agreements — the federal-local cooperation arrangements that let police departments work with ICE to identify and detain illegal immigrants in custody. It bans the use of local detention facilities for civil immigration enforcement. Existing 287(g) agreements across New York must be terminated by August 25. The law created a new Office of Immigrant Trust within Attorney General Letitia James's office, which has already sent letters to 12 local law enforcement agencies demanding compliance.
A Hochul spokesperson explained the rationale: "The way we keep New Yorkers safe is by focusing our local law enforcement on actual criminals, not assisting in ICE operations."
"Actual criminals." Jose Medina-Medina — the man who walked up to a group of teenagers, masked, and shot an 18-year-old girl to death unprovoked— had prior law enforcement contact. Under the policies Hochul just codified into state law, police departments would be prohibited from making that 10-second phone call Jessica Gorman described. The one that could have kept a Venezuelan national with a criminal history off a pier in Rogers Park on a night in March.
Congressman Mike Lawler, a Republican representing New York's 17th District, held a press conference at the Yorktown Police Department on July 25 with Assemblyman Matt Slater, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, and the Gorman family. Lawler put it plainly: the bill "prevents local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities and threatens to withhold state law enforcement funding" from agencies that don't comply.
The political math here is straightforward. Hochul knew the Gorman story. Every elected official in New York knew it. The family had testified before Congress, appeared at a presidential rally, and spoken to every outlet that would listen. There was no information gap. There was no ambiguity about what sanctuary policies had cost this family.
Hochul signed the law anyway. Created a new enforcement office to make sure it sticks. Set a deadline — August 25 — for every remaining 287(g) agreement in the state to be dissolved.
