A grieving Illinois father is holding state leaders accountable after his 20-year-old daughter was killed in a car crash caused by an illegal alien, saying sanctuary policies allowed the tragedy to happen, as reported by Fox News.

Joe Abraham’s daughter, Katie, died in January 2025 when her car was struck at high speed while she and a friend waited at a stoplight.

Police said the driver, a Guatemalan national in the U.S. illegally, was suspected of being intoxicated. Katie died at the scene, and her friend later died at a hospital.

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“My daughter was taken. We are separated, I will never see her again,” Abraham said Tuesday during an appearance on Fox & Friends.

“She got death; I got a life-sentence.”

Abraham directly blamed Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s sanctuary-style migrant policies. “His silence is deafening,” he said, criticizing Pritzker for not addressing the case publicly.

In response to the incident, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stepped up enforcement operations in Illinois, with federal officials saying the raids are being conducted in Katie’s honor.

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“Every day, the men and women of ICE and the other federal partners that are with us in Chicago, we honor Katie by going out there and getting these criminal aliens off the street,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said on Fox & Friends.

The Department of Homeland Security also tied its latest operations to the state’s policies. In a statement on X, DHS said Illinois’ sanctuary laws created conditions that allowed criminal migrants to remain at large.

Gov. Pritzker rejected those claims, accusing federal authorities of trying to instill fear. “Instead of taking steps to work with us on public safety, the Trump Administration’s focused on scaring Illinoisians,” Pritzker wrote on X.

Once again, this isn’t about fighting crime. That requires support and coordination — yet we’ve experienced nothing like that over the past several weeks.

Instead of taking steps to work with us on public safety, the Trump Administration’s focused on scaring Illinoisians. https://t.co/LoFPM0E4PF

— Governor JB Pritzker (@GovPritzker) September 8, 2025

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also objected, saying the city received “no notice of any enhanced immigration action by the Trump administration.”

He argued that ICE has a history of detaining American citizens by mistake and said he opposes operations that bypass local oversight.

Abraham dismissed those defenses, saying the tragedy was preventable. “With a proper immigration system, the migrant who killed my daughter could have been filtered out,” he said.

Lyons stressed that ICE will continue its operations in Chicago and across the country. “We are out there arresting criminal aliens, known suspected terrorists and gang members that are ruining our community,” he said.

“The men and women of ICE are going to stay in Chicago, and we’re going to stay at all the major cities across the United States to ensure that we remove this public safety threat from our neighborhoods.”