Cook County, Illinois, released more than 400 illegal immigrants arrested on criminal charges back onto local streets in 2025, even as federal authorities sought to take them into custody, public records obtained by America First Legal show. The conservative legal group secured the data through a public records request covering January to December 2025, painting a stark picture of what happens when sanctuary policies collide with immigration enforcement.
Against those 400-plus releases, Cook County transferred just 86 jailed illegal immigrants to federal custody during the same period. The math is blunt: for every person handed over to ICE, roughly five walked free despite an active federal detainer.
The numbers land in the middle of an intensifying legal and political confrontation between the Trump administration and Illinois officials over who bears responsibility when released illegal immigrants go on to commit violent crimes. That confrontation reached a grim turning point in March, when 18-year-old college student Sheridan Gorman was fatally shot in Chicago. The man charged in her killing, Jose Medina-Medina, is an illegal immigrant from Venezuela who had been arrested in Illinois on shoplifting charges in 2023, and released rather than deported.
The legal architecture behind those releases is no accident. Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Illinois Way Forward Act in 2021. The law prohibits local law enforcement agencies from signing immigration enforcement contracts with the federal government and limits their ability to investigate the immigration status of individuals detained on suspicion of crimes. More broadly, Illinois law bars state and local officers from honoring ICE detainers or transferring people to immigration authorities unless presented with a federal criminal warrant.
Pritzker framed the law as a matter of inclusion when he signed it. He said at the time:
“Throughout my governorship, I’ve directed my administration to adopt policies that make Illinois a welcoming state for immigrants, and I’m proud to sign these accountability measures into law to advance our cause.”
He added: “Every family, every child, every human being deserves to feel safe and secure in the place they call home. I am committed to making sure that value defines what it means to live in Illinois.”
Those words carry a different weight now. Sheridan Gorman’s family might reasonably ask whether their daughter felt safe and secure in the place she called home, and whether the policies Pritzker championed made her less so.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that the detainer system exists for a reason, and that sanctuary jurisdictions are undermining it at the public’s expense.
“The safest way to arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens from our streets is by lodging arrest detainers.”
The spokesperson went further, saying that “because sanctuary cities refuse to work with ICE law enforcement, criminal illegal aliens are released from jails into American communities to perpetuate more crimes.” DHS also noted that “nearly 70% of ICE arrests” involve illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of a crime in the United States.
That figure matters. It counters the suggestion, offered by groups like the Cato Institute, which compiled data finding illegal immigrants are far less likely to be convicted of crimes than native-born Americans, that immigration enforcement sweeps up mostly harmless people. When seven out of ten ICE arrests involve someone with a criminal record in this country, the detainer system is not casting a wide net. It is targeting people local jails already have in custody on criminal charges.
The federal government’s frustration with Illinois has moved well beyond rhetoric. The Trump administration sued Illinois, Chicago, and Cook County to block sanctuary laws the Justice Department says deliberately obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The complaint cites the Way Forward Act, the TRUST Act, the Welcoming City Act, and Cook County Ordinance 11-O-73, arguing each violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause. The lawsuit names Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and other local officials as defendants.
Court filings in that case spell out what the release-and-repeat cycle looks like in practice. The DOJ told a federal court that in January 2025, Cook County did not respond to an ICE detainer request for a noncitizen jailed on sexual assault of a minor charges. That individual was released from local custody and arrested for homicide just 17 days later.
The DOJ’s filing for summary judgment was direct: “Defendants’ sanctuary policies cause significant harm to federal immigration enforcement and public safety by not honoring immigration detention orders, or helping facilitate access to detainees in local custody.” DOJ also alleged that staff at Illinois facilities have ordered ICE officers to leave when agents tried to stage arrests outside state or local facilities.
Illinois officials, meanwhile, are seeking to delay briefing on the DOJ’s summary judgment motion. Pritzker has insisted the state does not stop federal agents acting with criminal warrants, a distinction the governor leans on heavily. But the gap between a criminal warrant and an ICE detainer is precisely where hundreds of illegal immigrants slip back onto the streets. The detainer is the standard federal tool. Illinois law treats it as insufficient.
The broader federal push includes financial pressure. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a directive to limit federal funding to sanctuary cities, including Chicago. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold funding from jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement operations. Bondi gave Illinois leaders until August 19 to prove they were complying with federal law and describe steps to eliminate policies that impede federal enforcement. “If they’re not going to keep their citizens safe, Donald Trump will keep them safe,” Bondi said.
America First Legal attorney Will Scolinos did not mince words about the data his organization uncovered. He told Fox News Digital that “Cook County and the State of Illinois have turned sanctuary policies into a deadly shield for criminal illegal aliens.” He called the killing of Sheridan Gorman “the predictable outcome” of what he described as policies that endanger American lives.
Fox News Digital reached the Illinois Office of the Governor via email on Tuesday morning for comment. The extraction does not indicate whether the governor’s office responded.
Pritzker, for his part, accused President Trump of “politicizing” the Gorman killing and called on the administration to provide more public safety funding. Yet Pritzker himself signed the very law that prevented Cook County from honoring the ICE detainer that might have kept Medina-Medina off Chicago’s streets. The governor has also told CNN: “Well, let me start by being clear that when we’re talking about violent criminals who’ve been convicted and who are undocumented, we don’t want them in our state. We want them out of the country.” The contradiction is plain: Pritzker says he wants violent criminal illegal immigrants deported, but the law he signed blocks the primary mechanism federal agents use to make that happen.
The legal battles over sanctuary policies are playing out across multiple fronts. A recent Ninth Circuit ruling blocked California’s attempt to regulate ICE agents, handing that state’s governor a significant legal defeat on federal immigration authority.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to press enforcement. ICE operations have targeted illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes, including child sex offenses and drug distribution, during operations across the country. In other cases, agents have arrested illegal immigrants shielded by sanctuary protections for years, sometimes carrying deportation orders that went unenforced for decades.
Congress has also moved to address the enforcement pipeline. Senate Republicans rolled out a $140 billion immigration enforcement plan that would expand detention capacity and fund the kind of operations sanctuary jurisdictions are working to block.
More than 400 illegal immigrants arrested on criminal charges, released. Eighty-six transferred to federal custody. An 18-year-old college student dead. A man previously arrested and released now charged with her murder. A governor who signed the law that made it all possible, then accused the federal government of playing politics when the consequences arrived.
The DHS spokesperson’s statement stands as the clearest summary of the problem: sanctuary cities release criminal illegal immigrants into American communities, and those communities pay the price. Cook County’s own records, obtained through a public records request, confirm the scale. This is not a hypothetical policy debate. It is a documented pattern with a body count.
And the question facing Illinois voters is not complicated. When a jurisdiction arrests someone on criminal charges, discovers that person is in the country illegally, receives a federal detainer requesting custody, and then opens the door and lets that person walk, whose safety is that policy designed to protect?
It is not Sheridan Gorman’s.
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