I recently had the privilege of testifying before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement alongside Jessica Gorman.

Privilege may seem like an odd word. Under different circumstances, I would never have met Jessica or her family. We were brought together by the worst day of our lives.

Jessica's daughter, Sheridan, was 18. My daughter, Katie, was 20. They were remarkable young women with lives full of promise. They should have had decades ahead of them to pursue their dreams, build careers, raise families, and contribute to their communities. Instead, those futures were stolen, and our country is poorer because they are no longer here.

Like my family, Jessica's will spend the rest of their lives carrying a burden no parent should ever know. We do not simply mourn our daughters, we live each day knowing their deaths were preventable. Every birthday, holiday, and milestone they should have celebrated reminds us not only of what we lost, but of what never should have happened.

That burden followed Jessica and me into the hearing room.

We did not come to Congress seeking sympathy alone. We came seeking something every grieving family deserves: an honest willingness to examine whether public policy failed, whether those failures can be corrected, and whether another family can be spared the lifelong pain we now endure.

Many members expressed sincere condolences, and I am grateful for every genuine expression of compassion. Losing a child transcends politics.

Yet as the hearing unfolded, a troubling pattern emerged.

Again and again, expressions of sympathy were followed by qualifications. Rather than first asking whether different decisions might have........

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