After apparently unfounded rumors of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity at local schools swirled in the afternoon, State College Area School District Superintendent Curtis Johnson spent a few minutes at Monday night’s school board meeting explaining the district’s protocols for allowing law enforcement to enter buildings.
Rumors online and among community members claimed that ICE had arrived at State College schools such as Easterly Parkway Elementary, Park Forest Middle and State High, prompting lockdowns. District spokesman Nabil Mark told StateCollege.com on Monday afternoon that the claims were not true and that there had been no immigration enforcement activity at SCASD buildings.
While not specifically referencing the ICE rumors, Johnson said at the start of Monday night’s board meting that “given the recent conversations surrounding the possibility of law enforcement entering buildings,” he wanted to provide an overview of the district’s policies if a local, state or federal officer arrives at a SCASD school building.
“To be clear, SCASD does not allow any law enforcement representatives to gain access to our buildings without proper legal approval,” Johnson said. “Should an agent come to the building, no information about an individual student, family member or SCASD employee would be shared, nor would any immediate access to the building beyond the main office be granted.”
School administrators would notify district leadership and legal counsel would review the request to enter the building, along with any documentation such as a judicial warrant, according to Johnson.
“Only after a thorough legal review would any further steps be considered,” he said.
The concerns arose as the Trump administration began a sweeping deportation effort across the country, arresting more than 3,500 people in less than a week. The administration is allowing arrests of migrants in the U.S. illegally at places such as schools and churches, ending a policy that had been in place since 2011.
The raids have also inspired hoaxes and rumors that have set several communities nationwide on edge.
“Please know we will do everything legally possible to protect our school communities and the safety and security of our students their families and our employees,” Johnson said.
The local impact of Trump’s immigration policy has also raised concerns among State College Borough Council, which raised issues such as how immigrants would be treated and how borough police would interact with federal agents at a work session in early January.
“This community obviously is a community that has grown over the years,” Council President Evan Myers said. “There are more and more immigrants here, more and more folks from other places. We’ve made it one of the cornerstones of this community to welcome and protect those folks.”
The State College Police Department has “a pretty robust immigration policy” that was developed with Penn State Law’s Center for Immigrant Rights Clinic and has been in place since 2017, Chief John Gardner said.
The policy, among other things, affirms that the department is committed to providing services to all members of the community, including non-citizens, can assist certain non-citizen victims with obtaining a visa and does not ask for or collect information about immigrant status. Officers have also undergone an “Immigration 101” training in 2018 and 2022, and the department works with multiple legal and immigration community organizations.
State College police do not play an active role in enforcing immigration law, Gardner said.
“The only way we would get involved in any type of immigration case is on a federal judge’s order or an arrest warrant,” he said. “As far as any round-ups or anything, we would not get involved in that.”
The department also has a policy prohibiting bias-based policing in an effort to prevent profiling.
Councilman Gopal Balachandran said that past administrations have prioritized targets for immigration enforcement, but worried that Trump’s pledge of mass deportations would result in profiling of innocent individuals.
Balachandran made those remarks before several U.S. citizens were reportedly detained and questioned in ICE raids during Trump’s first week in office.
“Are there going to be people who are legally here that are stopped based on their appearance being swept up in this kind of deportation ring, which I think is a real, real fear?” Balachandran said. “So it’s heartening to hear that our local police department is not going to be engaged in that. I think the real question we need to think about as a community is what happens if we have federal agents within our community trying to enforce these rules where there are people who are deportable or had a deportation order and are still in the United States illegally. I think it’s going to be a very tough question.”
Gardner said during the work session that State College has seen little ICE activity in the past decade, and the most recent significant immigration enforcement in the area was a 2015 raid, when several restaurant owners were charged with bringing in undocumented individuals from multiple countries to work for well below minimum wage.
“We’ve made it very clear to those officials that immigration and immigration enforcement is a civil matter,” he said. “It’s not a criminal matter, and it’s not up to local law enforcement to enforce federal civil process.”
Should a change in state law compel local departments to participate in immigration enforcement — which is unlikely with a divided legislature — borough police would be sworn to enforce it as an instrumentality of the commonwealth, Borough Manager Tom Fountaine added.