Patricia Fox walked into a House Judiciary Committee hearing and laid out what sanctuary policies look like when the headlines fade. Her daughter, Carissa Aspnes, survived a violent hit-and-run in Aurora, Colorado, but survival came with a crushing price: brain injury, constant care, and a family forced to fight the system while trying to keep their daughter alive.
Fox testified that Carissa was struck on March 28, 2025, by an illegal alien who ran a stop sign, crossed multiple lanes of traffic, and slammed into the motorcycle Carissa was riding. The driver and passengers fled without even checking whether she was alive. Carissa made it through emergency surgery, but the aftermath changed everything in an instant.
What followed was not recovery in any normal sense. Carissa is now minimally conscious, unable to speak, bound to a wheelchair, and fed through a tube, while her mother handles the daily grind of care with no room to breathe. Patricia described using a Hoyer lift every morning to move her adult daughter out of bed, a routine that shows how deeply a single crash can shatter an entire home.
Sanctuary cities and sanctuary states are often pitched as kind, thoughtful, and humane. That sounds nice until the costs land on ordinary families who had nothing to do with the policy games. In this case, the bill was paid in pain, lost independence, and a daughter whose future was ripped away by a collision that should never have happened.
The financial strain has been brutal, too. Patricia said Carissa’s care has already climbed into the seven figures once surgery, rehab, therapy, and denied equipment are added up, with monthly expenses still running into the thousands. The family has had to lean on donations while also battling for basic support that should have been straightforward from the start.
Even the smallest needs became another fight. Colorado Medicaid denied in-home nursing, and a wheelchair Carissa actually needs was also denied, leaving Patricia to fill the gap herself. She feeds her daughter, bathes her, brushes her teeth, manages medications, and reads signs of pain from someone who can no longer explain what hurts.
The hearing also exposed how lopsided these priorities can feel to families on the ground. Patricia pointed to Colorado’s spending on health coverage for people without qualifying immigration status while her own daughter struggled to get basic care after being maimed on the road. That contrast cut hard because it showed exactly where the state’s attention was going.
The legal outcome added insult to injury. Prosecutors dropped every charge against the driver except one reduced felony, and the restitution focused on the motorcycle instead of the human damage left behind. Patricia’s line about a motorcycle receiving more justice than her daughter landed with the kind of force that sticks in the room long after the testimony ends.
Eventually, the driver was deported after the family reached out to ICE’s Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office. That brought a little movement on the enforcement side, but it did nothing to reverse the damage already done or restore the years Carissa lost. The family still lives with the day-to-day weight of a case that never should have become their reality.
Patricia Fox is not chasing politics for sport. She is a mother who knows her daughter’s expressions, movements, and heart rate because that is the language left to them now, and she went to Washington anyway to speak for families caught in the same trap. Her testimony kept circling back to one blunt idea: public safety matters, and policies that ignore it can leave a trail of broken families behind them.
That point gets sharper when the debate turns to who gets to drive, who gets protected, and who gets left holding the bag when things go wrong. Roughly 19 states and Washington, D.C., now allow driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status, and critics argue that this kind of policy invites danger instead of stopping it. For Patricia, the issue is no longer abstract, because the consequences are sitting in a wheelchair at home, demanding care every hour of the day.
