The murder of Loyola University Chicago freshman Sheridan Gorman continues to reverberate through Chicago’s political landscape, with Joe Abraham, whose daughter Katie was killed under similar circumstances involving a repeat offender released under Illinois sanctuary policies, publishing a piece in Fox News warning that his family’s tragedy was not an isolated event but a foreseeable consequence of deliberate policy choices. Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to address both the political fallout from Gorman’s killing and what he described as a fiscal deterioration in Chicago that has now moved beyond the reach of any plausible political remedy.
On the sanctuary policy question, Glennon said the blood-on-hands framing is not hyperbole but the only accurate way to describe the culpability of officials who have designed and defended the policies that allowed Gorman’s alleged killer to remain on the streets. He noted a series of pieces in The Federalist making the same case in direct terms, and pointed to signals from Springfield suggesting that Governor Pritzker may resist turning the suspect over to ICE, which would represent the sanctuary framework functioning precisely as its architects intended even in the wake of a politically explosive killing. Glennon observed that Rogers Park Alderwoman Maria Hadden’s public response to the murder, in which she suggested Gorman’s group may have startled a man with a gun by walking to the end of a pier, and that there was no cause for broader community concern, illustrated the depth of the political class’s commitment to minimizing the consequences of its own policy decisions.
Proft raised the question of whether any of the candidates circulating interest in the 2026 Chicago mayoral race represents a meaningful departure from the sanctuary and public safety policies that have defined the Johnson administration, and Glennon’s answer was essentially no. He said he does not see a substantive policy divide between the names most frequently mentioned, including various figures he grouped together as products of the same political machine that has governed Chicago for decades. More fundamentally, he argued, the question of who becomes the next mayor may be largely academic given the scale of the structural fiscal problems the city now faces.
Glennon said Wirepoints has essentially reframed its mission around chronicling what he described as Chicago’s march toward Detroit, while noting that Chicago’s situation may actually be worse than Detroit’s was because the conditions that made Detroit’s bankruptcy ultimately workable are absent here. Detroit succeeded in part because Michigan had a Republican governor and legislature who appointed a capable emergency manager and gave him genuine authority to restructure the city’s obligations, and because the city unexpectedly discovered roughly a billion dollars in assets in the form of its art collection that could be monetized as part of a reorganization plan. Illinois, Glennon said, would have the same political combine that created the crisis appointing any emergency manager, guaranteeing that the process would be captured and corrupted just as every other institutional mechanism has been. He also noted that Chicago has already sold off future sales tax revenue to cover operating expenses, leaving the city with fewer unencumbered assets than Detroit had to work with, while pension obligations remain so large that even aggressive reform could not close the gap.
The more immediate warning sign, Glennon said, is in the bond market, where the deterioration is already visible in real time. Goldman Sachs was unable to sell a Chicago bond offering last year, and a more recent offering had to indefinitely postpone its tax-exempt tranche because buyers could not be found, with only the taxable portion successfully placed into corporate bond markets with international investors. When a major city can no longer reliably sell its debt, Glennon said, the mechanism by which bad fiscal actors have sustained themselves by borrowing against future revenue to pay current obligations begins to break down, and that moment, he argued, is effectively here rather than somewhere on the horizon.
The population data reinforces the picture. New IRS migration figures released last week, which lag real-time conditions by nearly three years, show a net loss of 780,000 taxpayers from Illinois over the past twenty-three years. The aggregate first-year income of those departed residents represents ninety-four billion dollars in tax base that has permanently left the state, a figure Glennon said his organization is working to translate into a lifetime value calculation that would be considerably larger. He said the only path out of the fiscal crisis runs through growing the tax base, and that every major policy currently in place in Chicago and Springfield is accelerating movement in the opposite direction.