Jennifer Gorman, whose daughter Sheridan was murdered in Chicago by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela in a preventable crime that multiple law enforcement touchpoints failed to stop, testified before Congress last week in what Congressman Jim Jordan called perhaps the most powerful and emotional testimony he has heard in his years in Congress. Gorman described arriving in Chicago to claim her daughter’s body while Mayor Brandon Johnson was laughing and joking at a ceremony naming a snowplow Abolish ICE, and asked elected officials why her child’s life matters less than an illegal immigrant’s. Jordan, who represents Ohio’s Fourth District and chairs the House Judiciary Committee, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss pending legislation targeting sanctuary jurisdictions and the broader midterm landscape.
Jordan said approximately thirty-one and a half percent of the American population now lives in sanctuary jurisdictions, encompassing eighteen cities, eleven states, three large counties including Fairfax County and the District of Columbia, and of course Chicago and Illinois, where the political class instructs local law enforcement not to cooperate with federal authorities even when illegal immigrants commit additional crimes beyond their illegal entry. He described a four-part system that the left constructed over recent years: first, allow ten million illegal migrants into the country; second, create sanctuary jurisdictions that prevent local governments from removing those migrants when they commit crimes; third, defund the agencies responsible for removal, specifically ICE; and fourth, install prosecutors with written policies that take a criminal’s deportation status into account when deciding what charges to bring and what plea agreements to offer, effectively building deportation avoidance into the prosecution itself.
On the legislation his committee has advanced, Jordan said it attacks the problem from three directions simultaneously. First, it restricts federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Second, it protects local law enforcement officers who choose to work with federal agencies from being penalized by their local governments for doing so. Third, and most significantly, it creates a private civil cause of action that would allow families like the Gormans to sue the city, county, or state whose sanctuary policies contributed to the harm they suffered. He said under this legislation, the Gorman family could take legal action directly against the city of Chicago for its sanctuary policies.
Jordan acknowledged the criticism that the federal government has not gone to the mat on defunding sanctuary jurisdictions despite years of rhetoric, and said his legislation is designed to provide the multiple pressure points necessary to make the policy meaningful rather than symbolic. He said most local law enforcement officers want to cooperate with federal agencies and enforce the law, and that it is exclusively the political class on the left that prevents them from doing so.
On the administrative side, Jordan agreed that the Department of Transportation and other federal agencies need to use funding leverage against states that refuse to cooperate with efforts to identify illegal immigrants holding fraudulently obtained commercial driver’s licenses, citing the case of a CDL holder in Ohio who killed a twenty-one-year-old University of Massachusetts soccer player in a hit-and-run crash.
On the midterm outlook, Jordan said he believes Republicans can hold the House, citing redistricting advantages, strong fundraising, and good candidates. He said the most effective argument available is simply contrasting the two parties, summarizing the midterms in two sentences: they’re crazy, we’re not. He cited Dan Goldman’s thirty-point primary loss in New York as the single most illustrative data point, noting that Goldman was the lead impeachment counsel Adam Schiff brought in to prosecute the case against Trump, and that even that level of partisan commitment was insufficient for the DSA-aligned wing of the party, which replaced him with what Jordan described as a crazy radical anti-Israel, anti-Semitic candidate.
On Ohio specifically, Jordan said the races for Senate and governor are tight but that he believes Republicans will prevail. He endorsed Senate candidate Frank LaRose’s opponent Bernie Moreno’s successor Jon Husted and said gubernatorial candidate Matt Dolan faces Amy Acton, whose primary credential is having been Ohio’s version of Fauci during COVID, attempting to shut down golf courses in the spring of 2021, which Jordan noted is essentially the definition of social distancing. He said Ohio was historically a fifty-fifty state before Trump carried it by eight and a half and then nearly twelve points, and that the underlying dynamics still favor Republicans even in a challenging midterm environment.
On Brandon Johnson’s reiteration that the over-reliance on jails and incarceration is a sickness, Jordan said the statement speaks for itself in a city where a man who served time for a CTA hammer attack was charged over the weekend with another robbery on the Red Line, and where the political leadership’s response to preventable violent crime continues to be more investment in community violence interruptors rather than the incarceration of repeat violent offenders.