This week, Patricia Fox stood before the House Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee and told lawmakers what sanctuary policies actually cost a family.
“My daughter, Carissa, was hit on March 28, 2025, by an illegal alien,” she testified. “She was launched head first into a concrete barrier. The driver and passengers of the vehicle fled. Never checking to see if my daughter was alive.” She continued: “Despite her initial prognosis, Carissa survived. Praise God. But survived and recovered are not the same.”
Sanctuary city and sanctuary state policies have been championed from coast to coast as the most compassionate, resolute action a city or state can take. But, no one has really asked what they cost the citizens who actually live there. Patricia Fox paid the ultimate price for sanctuary policies in Colorado.
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Carissa Aspnes was 22 years old and celebrating a new start. She had just returned home to Aurora, Colorado, from Chicago to launch a career as an esthetician, and on March 28, 2025, she climbed onto the back of a motorcycle to mark her birthday. Minutes later, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, Valeria De Los Angeles Bermudez Marcano, ran a stop sign, crossed three lanes of traffic and slammed into the motorcycle. She and her passengers fled the scene, leaving Carissa unconscious on the road without checking whether she was alive.
Carissa survived. However, 18 months later, her mother is still living what survival actually looks like. Carissa underwent emergency surgery to remove part of her skull and relieve brain swelling. She is now minimally conscious, nonverbal, wheelchair-bound and fed through a G-tube. “Every morning, I use a Hoyer lift to raise my adult daughter out of bed because she can’t sit up, stand or get herself up,” Patricia testified.
Carissa’s physician says she needs two people to safely assist her. “Colorado Medicaid denied us in-home nursing,” Patricia said. “So I figure it out.” Medicaid denied the wheelchair Carissa actually needs, too. So Patricia blends her daughter’s food, feeds her through the tube, brushes her teeth, bathes her and administers her medications, all while learning to read pain in a daughter who can no longer tell her where it hurts.
The financial toll is staggering. Between emergency surgery, rehabilitation and the $3,000 to $4,000 a month in ongoing therapy, equipment, and care that insurance routinely denies, Patricia says Carissa’s medical bills already total seven figures. She has been trying to raise money to cover those expenses through a GoFundMe campaign. And the toll isn’t only financial. Patricia’s 19-year-old daughter has already begun preparing for the day she and her older brother must take over Carissa’s care. At 19, her future has been rewritten by a crash she had nothing to do with.
“One collision created an entire family of victims,” Patricia testified.
And justice never arrived. Prosecutors dropped every charge against Bermudez Marcano except a single reduced Class 5 felony. As part of the plea deal, she was ordered to pay $15,000 in restitution, but only for the motorcycle. For Carissa’s brain injury, her wheelchair, her feeding tube, her family’s shattered future, there was nothing. “A motorcycle received more justice than my daughter,” Patricia testified.
Bermudez Marcano was eventually deported, but only after Patricia’s family reached out directly to ICE’s Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office, which was created to connect victims and their families with case updates, resources and support as they navigate the immigration enforcement process against the person who harmed them.
Meanwhile, Colorado projected roughly $127 million from its General Fund this year for a program called Cover All Coloradans, which provides healthcare to people who lack qualifying immigration status, Patricia told the committee. Those are a state’s fiscal priorities laid bare: money for healthcare coverage regardless of legal status, while a citizen who was maimed by someone with no legal right to be driving on Colorado’s roads fights her own state’s Medicaid program for basic nursing care.
OPEN BORDERS WERE INSANE, BUT POLITICIANS DIDN’T CARE. FAMILIES LIKE MINE PAID THE PRICE
Patricia Fox is not a political operative. She is a mother who has become fluent in her daughter’s facial expressions, movements and heart rate because that’s the only language Carissa has left. Yet she made the trip to Washington anyway, sharing her family’s story as one of the Angel Families whose lives were permanently altered by policies that hand driving privileges to people who have no legal right to be behind the wheel in the first place.
Carissa’s story is not isolated. Mary Ann Mendoza has spent over a decade fighting the same fight since an illegal immigrant driving the wrong way on an Arizona highway, three times over the legal limit, killed her son, Police Sgt. Brandon Mendoza, in 2014. Joe Abraham buried his 20-year-old daughter, Katie, after a previously deported illegal immigrant struck her car at nearly 80 miles per hour and fled the scene.
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Roughly 19 states and Washington, D.C., now allow people to obtain a driver’s license regardless of immigration status, sometimes without requiring English proficiency to read a stop sign. This is not compassion. It is a public safety failure with a body count, and the families paying for it are the ones who did everything right. I started the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety and the Caldwell Foundation for Public Safety because I believe the safety of American citizens has to come before politics, on both sides of the aisle. Carissa Fox’s family should not have to choose between fighting Colorado Medicaid and fighting for their daughter’s dignity.
Every family in this piece did everything right. They followed the law, raised their children to do the same and still buried them or, in Patricia’s case, watched a daughter’s future disappear in an instant. Sanctuary policies didn’t protect Carissa, Brandon, or Katie. They protected the people who took everything from them. Until we stop calling that compassion, more families will learn the same lesson the hard way.
