Chicago police have served just 3 of the 91 firearm search warrants issued under Karina's Law, according to a new Chicago Sun-Times investigation highlighted on November 13 by Legal Aid Chicago, whose attorneys feature in the reporting. The finding puts a hard number on what survivors and their lawyers have been saying since the Illinois law took effect in May 2025: the court can order a gun removed from an alleged abuser's home, but in Chicago the order is rarely carried out.

Source: Legal Aid Chicago / Chicago Sun-Times

Karina's Law requires Illinois law enforcement to confiscate firearms from people subject to an order of protection. When a person is served with an emergency order, they must surrender their firearms immediately, or within 24 hours if the weapons are not on them. If they do not comply, a judge can issue a search-and-seizure warrant — and police are then required to execute that warrant within 96 hours. The Sun-Times investigation examines the gaps in implementing that system in Chicago, and the ongoing challenges survivors face when seeking to have firearms removed from people who pose a threat to their safety.

The killing that gave the law its name

The law is named after Karina Gonzalez, who lived in Chicago's Little Village neighbourhood. According to prosecutors, Gonzalez was shot and killed by her husband, Jose Alvarez, on July 3, 2023, over the Fourth of July weekend. Her 15-year-old daughter, Daniela, was also killed, and her 18-year-old son, Manny Alvarez, was wounded. Gonzalez had been granted an order of protection against her husband, which led to his Firearm Owner's Identification (FOID) card being revoked — but his gun was never seized. The case against her husband was pending at the time of the law's signing, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Source: Chicago Tribune via Police1

That gap — a revoked card but a gun still in the home — is exactly what the law was written to close. Before Karina's Law, Illinois prohibited people under an order of protection from possessing firearms, but it was unclear who was actually responsible for removing the guns, and a person could hand firearms to a relative instead of surrendering them to police. The new law assigns the job to law enforcement, closes the transfer loophole, and allows agencies to arrange storage of seized firearms with federally licensed dealers or other law enforcement agencies.

How the law passed — and what it requires

Governor JB Pritzker signed Karina's Law (House Bill 4144) on February 10, 2025, after it passed the Illinois Senate 43-10 and the House 80-33 during the legislature's lame-duck session in early January 2025. “Karina's law will protect survivors of domestic violence and give them comfort, the comfort of knowing that their abuser will not have easy access to firearms,” Pritzker said at a news conference in Chicago. The law took effect 90 days after signing, on May 11, 2025.

Source: NPR Illinois

Under the law, a person who seeks an order of protection can also ask the court to issue a search warrant allowing local law enforcement to seize firearms from the accused abuser. The petitioner or the state's attorney must demonstrate probable cause that the accused abuser poses an immediate threat to the petitioner. State Senator Celina Villanueva, a Democrat from Little Village and one of the bill's sponsors, noted during the signing debate that officials were still working through concerns about how police would store the guns officers confiscate — a logistics question that has followed the law into implementation. The Illinois State Rifle Association and the Illinois Federation for Outdoor Resources opposed the bill, arguing it violated an alleged abuser's due-process rights.

The numbers behind the law are stark. Between 2019 and 2023, Illinois saw a 63% increase in gun-related domestic violence deaths, according to Capitol News Illinois. In Cook County alone, 148 gun seizure warrants were issued after the law took effect — compared with just 85 over the entire previous decade — and 58 guns were seized, according to a Women's Rights Data Project summary of the law's first phase. The same summary notes that nearly half of those warrants were later dismissed, often because of procedural challenges — including the burden placed on survivors, who in many cases have had to fill out their own warrants.

Source: Capitol News Illinois / Women's Rights Data Project

What the Sun-Times finding means

Against that county-wide picture, the Sun-Times investigation's Chicago figure — 3 warrants served out of 91 issued — suggests the bottleneck in the state's largest city is not the courts issuing warrants, but the step after: execution by police within the 96-hour window the law sets. Legal Aid Chicago, which represents survivors in exactly these cases, highlighted the investigation on November 13 and said it features its attorneys and the challenges survivors face in having firearms removed from people who threaten them. For a survivor, an unserved warrant means the protection order exists on paper while the gun it was meant to remove remains where it was.

A follow-up law takes effect January 1

Lawmakers have already moved to tighten the system once. Senate Bill 3329, sponsored by Senator Villanueva and signed into law, builds on Karina's Law: it prohibits any third party from knowingly transferring a firearm to a respondent in an order-of-protection case, or allowing that respondent access to a firearm, and it requires law enforcement to take reasonable steps to notify petitioners if the agency seeks to correct or nullify a search warrant for a respondent's firearms. That follow-up law goes into effect January 1.

Source: Senator Celina Villanueva

What happens next

The Sun-Times investigation puts the execution gap on the public record, and survivor advocates are expected to press the Chicago Police Department and city and state officials on why so few warrants are being served within the legal deadline. The January 1 follow-up law will add petitioner-notification duties and close the third-party transfer route, but it does not by itself serve a warrant — that remains a police execution task. For Chicago survivors and the lawyers who represent them, the measure of Karina's Law in 2027 will not be how many warrants judges issue, but how many are carried out in the 96 hours the law allows.