Jennifer Bos traveled to Washington to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. She told senators about her daughter Megan, whose partially decomposed body was found stuffed inside a garbage can in April 2025 after a 51-day search. The suspect in the case is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was initially released by an Illinois judge because state charges did not qualify for pretrial detention.
Bos was there to support the confirmation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. But she used her time to say something else, too.
“I haven’t spoken with them,” she said, referring to the lawmakers who represent her in Congress. “He spoke to me.”
The “him” she was referring to was Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the ranking member of the very committee she was sitting before. It was, she said, the first time he had ever addressed her directly.
Durbin scrambled. “Miss Bos, anxious to meet with you,” he said. “I hope we can do it soon, maybe right after this.” By the end of the hearing, he offered to meet with her immediately, before she left the building.
“I didn’t know it was a hardship for you to make this journey here, testify, from Illinois,” Durbin said. “And I don’t want you to have to wait to see me. I want to meet with you now.”
Bos testified alongside other Angel Families, relatives of Americans killed or harmed in crimes involving illegal immigrants, who have spent years pressing Congress for stricter immigration enforcement. She told the committee that legislation introduced to address these cases had been met with silence. “And there hasn’t been any way to really get in and talk to anybody, especially those who are opposed to those legislations for whatever reason,” she said.
Bos praised Blanche for intervening after local officials in Illinois declined to hold Mendoza-Gonzalez in custody. ICE arrested Jose Luis Mendoza-Gonzalez in Chicago in July 2025 on federal immigration charges. He remains in federal custody and also faces state charges connected to Megan Bos’s death.
“I’m asking the committee not to wait until another mother is sitting where I am,” Bos told senators. “Confirm Todd Blanche. He is a leader who will uphold the law, honor victims, confront dangerous criminal organizations, and fight to give other American families the safety and lasting protection that came too late for mine.”
