Joe Abraham’s daughter Katie was injured so badly in a crash caused by a drunken illegal immigrant that her family was denied the dignity of holding an open-casket visitation and funeral. More than a year and a half later, the life-long Illinois Angel Dad says his heart is broken in so many ways it will never fit back together again.
Now Abraham has a warning for his neighbors to the north flirting with electing a socialist governor: Don’t Illinois Wisconsin.
Illinois, in this case, is a verb.
“Don’t become Illinois, Wisconsin. Please,” Abraham told me on a recent episode of The Benjamin Yount Show, on NewsTalk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee.
“I’m not trying to tell anybody how to vote, [but] I’ve seen this play before,” he said of Illinois’ far-left Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker and fellow leftists that control the state’s legislature. “Here’s the thing, what they’ve said in the past is going to be your best judge of what’s going to happen in the future.”
Pritzker’s sanctuary state policies have aided and abetted illegal aliens in breaking U.S. immigration laws — and in helping violent illegal immigrants escape justice. In 2021, the billionaire Democrat signed a suite of bills into law, making Illinois the second state in the nation to block local law enforcement officials from partnering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Pritzker’s predecessor, RINO Gov. Bruce Rauner, signed the original TRUST Act in 2017 that began restrictions on local and state law enforcement officials assisting in federal civil immigration enforcement. Pritzker expanded the restrictions.
Katie Abraham was killed in January 2025 when a vehicle driven by Julio Cucul-Bol, a Guatemalan national, plowed into the car she was riding in. The previously deported illegal alien was drunk and driving his SUV at nearly 80 miles per hour when he collided with the vehicle, stopped at a red light on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana, according to the criminal complaint. Chloe Polzin, 21, who was riding in the backseat with Katie, died at the hospital from her injuries.
Cucul-Bol was later sentenced to 30 years in prison. It’s unlikely he’ll serve the full sentence.
Abraham has pressed Pritzker for answers. He’s received silence.
“Katie’s death was not inevitable. It was preventable,” the grieving father said during a Senate committee hearing earlier this year.
He wants Wisconsin voters to hear that message as they head to the polls.
‘Abolishing ICE Isn’t Radical’
Democratic socialist Francesca Hong (a communist by any other name) is the clear frontrunner in Tuesday’s Democratic Party of Wisconsin primary to select a candidate for governor. Whatever is left of the party’s “establishment” is panicking, worried that a Hong candidacy in November’s general election could cost Democrats the executive branch that it has held for the better part of the past decade in the purple swing state.
No matter how hard Hong tries, the state representative from socialist citadel Madison can’t run from her radical policy positions and comments, particularly on abolishing ICE and defunding police. Hong, like so many of her fellow leftists, jumped into the crowded race for governor apparently thinking social media posts have an expiration date.
The socialist with a penchant for the “F” bomb and wacky woke statements has called for canceling Thanksgiving, insisting the beloved holiday was the “original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx and women.” She has joined some of her socialist friends in calling for the Senate to be abolished. She has apologized for apparently not being antisemitic enough.
Fearing backlash from Democratic Party voters who haven’t plunged headfirst into the DSA’s radical waters, Hong has awkwardly attempted to distance herself from herself. She no longer wants to cancel Thanksgiving. “I actually love it,” the shameless gubernatorial candidate recently told Politico. Her campaign lied to Fox News in insisting that Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany, the GOP’s candidate for governor, “cannot produce a single statement where” Hong said she wanted to “Abolish the Senate.”
But Hong’s rewrite of her hatred for law enforcement is more inventive than The 1619 Project.
Hong has sidestepped, danced, and downright trampled over her long record of support for defunding the police.
“I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” the candidate wrote on Twitter in late August 2020, not long before portions of Kenosha, Wisconsin, went up in flames during Black Lives Matter riots.
She said the same many more times as she was spewing her antipathy for police. It became perhaps Hong’s loudest political rallying cries.
Hong’s hatred for federal immigration law enforcement is even more visceral.
“Abolishing ICE isn’t radical — it’s good policy,” she posted on Instagram earlier this year. She described the agency as a “rogue agency” that is “essentially comprised of white supremacists.”
The radical lawmaker introduced the so-called “Keep Families Together” proposal, a package of five bills that would neuter ICE’s ability to enforce federal immigration laws. Hong’s legislation disregards the Supremacy Clause in the U.S. Constitution as it seeks to close illegal alien detention centers and forbids all state and local collaboration with ICE.
Just like in JB Pritzker’s Illinois.
A Matter Of TRUST
Illinois Republicans have tried, fruitlessly, to reform the TRUST Act. State Sen. Dave Syverson, co-sponsored Senate Bill 4196, legislation aimed at removing barriers that prevent “Illinois law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.”
In a recent Facebook post, the senator pointed to the arrest of Hamed Mohammed Hamed Alsaidi, a Jordanian man who, according to the Department of Homeland Security, was caught over the weekend carrying eight Molotov cocktails while searching for an open gas station. Will County officials had previously released Alsaidi from custody despite a federal detainer for the Jordanian who, DHS said, was unlawfully in the country.
Illinois law enforcement officials have asked for reforms to a law that has made their communities less safe. As Abraham said about his daughter, Katie is not an anomaly.
In March, police say 18-year-old Sheridan Gorman was gunned down in cold blood by a Venezuelan foreign national as she walked with friends along Lake Michigan. The Loyola University freshman allegedly was murdered by an illegal immigrant who was detained at the border in 2023, only to be released into the United States thanks to President Joe Biden’s open border policies, according to a federal criminal complaint.
‘It Doesn’t End Well’
While Hong may be the most strident opponent of federal immigration law enforcement in Wisconsin’s race for governor, her fellow leftist competitors hold no affection for ICE.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the so-called Democrat “establishment” candidate backed by outgoing far-left Gov. Tony Evers, has railed against local law enforcement partnering with ICE.
“Local law enforcement in Wisconsin should not get deputized as federal immigration agents, and no one should get access to a county jail without a judicial warrant,” Crowley told the left-leaning Cap Times. “That is the standard I have held Milwaukee County to, and it is a standard the state should set for the agencies it trains and certifies.”
Like his new best political pal Tony Evers, Crowley has backed proposals that would allow illegal aliens to be issued driver’s licenses, as Illinois does. Katie Abraham’s killer was licensed to drive despite the fact that he couldn’t speak or read English — or much Spanish for that matter.
Wisconsin State Sen. Kelda Roys, a Madison Democrat, has called ICE “incompatible with a free society.”
“And every day this rogue paramilitary force is terrorizing our communities is a day that every single one of us is less free,” Roys said in a podcast interview.
Katie Abraham. Photo Courtesy of Joe Abraham.
Joe Abraham knows what terror is. It’s the life sentence he and his family are now serving because sanctuary state Illinois failed at every turn to keep a violent illegal immigrant off the road.
Abraham said it’s too late for Illinois. The radical policies of the increasingly extreme leftists that control the Land of Lincoln’s government are “entrenched.” He said Wisconsin is on the same path, but it still has an “exit ramp.”
“I think once you go down that path you’re sort of stuck,” he said. “It doesn’t end well. It certainly didn’t end well for my family.”
