On December 2, 2024, two gunmen opened fire in Chicago, killing three people and injuring five others. Ricardo Granadillo Padilla and Edward Martinez Cermeno — both connected to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — carried out the shooting. Chicago police arrested a 32-year-old woman named Giovanna Mercedes Moreno Occhipinti three days later, on December 5, 2024, in connection with the attack.
She was a teacher. In Illinois. Teaching American children.
Moreno Occhipinti is a Venezuelan national with dual Italian citizenship who entered the United States in October 2021 through the Visa Waiver Program. Her visa expired on January 2, 2022. She didn't leave. She stayed, overstayed her legal welcome by years, found employment as a teacher, and according to federal authorities, maintained connections to one of the most violent gangs operating in the Western Hemisphere.
Chicago police had her in custody after the shooting. They arrested her on December 5, 2024. And then Chicago's sanctuary policies did what sanctuary policies do.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis laid it out plainly: "Although Chicago police arrested this illegal alien shortly after the shooting, sanctuary politicians released her from jail without notifying ICE."
Released. No call to immigration authorities. No hold. A woman connected to a Tren de Aragua mass shooting that left three people dead walked out of a Chicago jail because the city's political leadership decided that cooperating with federal immigration enforcement was beneath them.
The story gets worse. One of the actual gunmen, Edward Martinez Cermeno, had been in ICE custody and was released in January 2025 — before President Trump took office and overhauled enforcement priorities. So the federal government had one of the shooters and let him go, and then the city of Chicago had a woman connected to the shooting and let her go.
ICE finally arrested Moreno Occhipinti on May 13 of this year. DHS issued a statement that didn't require much interpretation: "Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS is doing the job that sanctuary politicians in Illinois refuse to do: putting the American people first and removing these dangerous criminals from our communities."
The Cook County State's Attorney's office has not publicly addressed why Moreno Occhipinti was released without an ICE notification. Chicago's sanctuary ordinance prohibits local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration detainers in most cases, which means the policy functioned exactly as designed. A woman tied to a gang mass shooting was processed through the system and returned to the community. That's not a malfunction. That's the feature.
Moreno Occhipinti entered on a visa waiver, overstayed by more than three years, was employed as a teacher responsible for children, was arrested in connection with a mass shooting carried out by members of Tren de Aragua, and was released by a sanctuary city without a word to ICE.
Every layer of that sentence was supposed to have a safeguard. The visa system, the employment verification, the criminal justice system, the cooperation between local and federal law enforcement. Every single one failed — or was deliberately disabled.
When every safeguard fails in the same direction, it stops being incompetence.