Officials in State College Borough and Centre County government expressed confusion and frustration this week over their inclusion on a since-deleted list of communities the Trump administration says are “defying federal immigration law.”
The borough and county were among more than 500 cities, counties and states nationwide and 16 in Pennsylvania that the Department of Homeland Security identified as “sanctuary jurisdictions” in a list published on Thursday. The list, which DHS said “will be regularly updated and can be changed at any time” was removed from the DHS website by Sunday and the URL returns a “page not found” message.
Speaking on Fox News on Sunday, however, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the department will continue to use the list.
“So that list is absolutely continuing to be used and it is going to be identifying those cities and those jurisdictions that aren’t honoring law and justice,” Noem said.
It was created after an April 28 executive order by President Donald Trump directing Noem and Attorney General Pamela Bondi to publish a list of states and jurisdictions that they considered to be obstructing federal immigration laws. A press release accompanying the list each jurisdiction would receive a “formal notification of its non-compliance” and s demand that they revise their policies or potentially face suspension or termination of certain federal funds.
Neither State College nor Centre County have received that notification. Officials from both said this week they comply with the law and do not know why they were included on the list.
A DHS spokesperson wrote in an email that the designation is based on a number of factors “including self-identification as a sanctuary jurisdiction, noncompliance with Federal law enforcement in enforcing immigration laws, restrictions on information sharing, and legal protections for illegal aliens.”
State College police chief John Gardner has previously said that because immigration enforcement is typically a matter of civil administrative law and the responsibility of federal authorities, his department does not get involved. But borough police do assist federal law enforcement with criminal investigations and complies with court orders.
Borough Council President Evan Myers said during Monday night’s regular meeting that immigration enforcement simply isn’t the jurisdiction of borough police, and noted that State College officials have explicitly said it is not an immigration sanctuary jurisdiction.
“Our police department does have a policy of not enforcing federal immigration law. This is really a reciprocal approach,” Myers said. “We wouldn’t expect [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to enforce our traffic laws or give out traffic tickets. It’s not their jurisdiction, like immigration measures are not in ours. At no point have we declared State College a sanctuary city for immigrants. In fact, we’ve stated we don’t regard ourselves as such.”
He speculated about reasons why the borough may have appeared on the list.
“Is it because we’re a welcoming community to immigrants, or because Penn State is located here with a large foreign student contingent?” Myers said. “Is it a mistake? Is it, as our DA has stated, apparently just made up?… Is this just one more capricious, cruel disorganization or incompetency from the Trump administration?”
He later added, “Perhaps it’s something more sinister, something meant to intimidate a community and county that values the worth of each individual, man or woman, gay or straight, transgender, whether race or creed or religion or immigrant status.”
Council member Gopal Balachandran, a law professor and longtime criminal defense attorney, said the borough’s policy for immigration enforcement is “very wise” and is not unique.
“It’s important that we realize that separation of powers that’s enshrined in our Constitution is not only between the different branches of the federal government, but it’s also about the relationship between state and local governments and the federal government,” Balachandran said. “And one of the reasons why it’s important that local governments should stay in their own lane and not be involved in immigration enforcement is because immigration enforcement is not our core function.
“Making sure our state and local laws are complied with… We expect our local police to be doing that. And our police department is already stretched thin. If they’re expected to take on tasks that they’re not meant to do, it takes away from their core functions, namely ensuring the public safety in our community.”
He added that making local police responsible for immigration enforcement could have a “chilling effect” on undocumented individuals who are victims of crimes.
“One of the ways that many undocumented people are targeted is through either sex crimes or through robberies,” Balachandran said. “I think we can all agree that as a society we want to see less violent crime and less sex crimes, and certainly [it] would take a toll on the reporting and enforcement of those serious crimes if we had our law enforcement being used as a wing of what’s really not in their jurisdiction, which is immigration enforcement.”
Mayor Ezra Nanes took exception to Noem’s statement in a press release that the list is “exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law.”
“I wholeheartedly disagree with this kind of language,” Nanes said. “It’s inflammatory, it is accusatory, without evidence… and it uses broad, harmful labels to target entire groups of people. As someone who took an oath to serve State College and who works every day with sincere intention to give my personal best for the safety and well-being of this community, to stand up for the values and principles that the people who live and work here have communicated to me, I can tell you it was disturbing to read.”
For Centre County, District Attorney Bernie Cantorna and Commissioner Steve Dershem said last week they knew of no policy or practice that could have landed the county on the list. At Tuesday’s Board of Commissioners meeting, Chair Mark Higgins said county officials remain “perplexed.”
“We comply with all relevant federal laws and regulations, and we regularly cooperate with federal law enforcement.,” Higgins said. “But, I mean, federal funding, they say, could be at risk
So, I mean, what could you do to comply? Well, we’re waiting for correspondence from the federal government telling us what the metrics were to get on the list in the first place, and then hopefully some sort of instructions on how we could work our way off the list. Unfortunately, at this point, we don’t know.”
Asked if there was reluctance to speak out because of the potential loss of federal funding, Higgins said, “We want to use measured words.”
“We want to be cautious because on a maybe best case scenario, we receive on an average year a couple million dollars of direct federal grants, but a large portion of our human services funding originates as federal funds that then passes through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Higgins said.
The Centre County Correctional Facility complies with detainer requests from ICE, Higgins said. He noted that the jail is not federally licensed.
“Most county correctional facilities or county jails are not federally licensed, so when we do notify them, they need to pick them up pretty quickly because we really can’t have them stay overnight,” Higgins said. “Plus there are two facilities in the immediate area that will hold federal detainees, including Clinton County and the GEO facility (a privately run ICE detention center) in Clearfield County.”
Commissioner Amber Concepcion stressed that the county does not know “what the factors or variables were” that led to Centre County’s inclusion, and that that uncertainty was widespread.
“There were a wide variety of jurisdictions that also don’t know why they were put on the list,” Concepcion said.
The list was met with pushback from communities and law enforcement across the country. It included sparsely populated counties that have little interaction with immigration authorities, that overwhelmingly voted for Trump and that have actively supported his hard-line immigration policies.
In California, the city of Huntington Beach made the list even though it filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s immigration sanctuary law and passed a resolution this year declaring the community a “non-sanctuary city.”
Officials in some deep-red communities designated sanctuary jurisdictions said the list doesn’t appear to make sense. Some said they believed it was a clerical error or resulted from confusion with their Second Amendment sanctuary policies.
Kieran Donahue, president of the National Sheriffs Association, said in a statement that the list lacked transparency and accountability.
“This list was created without any input, criteria of compliance, or a mechanism for how to object to the designation,” Donahue said. “Sheriffs nationwide have no way to know what they must do or not do to avoid this arbitrary label.”
He added that the decision could create a “vacuum of trust that may take years to overcome,” and that “the sheriffs of this country feel betrayed.”
In her interview with Fox, Noem seemed to double down on the list.
“That list – going forward – some of the cities have pushed back. They think because they don’t have one law or another on the books that they don’t qualify, but they do qualify,” Noem said. “They are giving sanctuary to criminals because they are not backing up our ICE officers, because they are not out there honoring detainers. They are not letting us know when these dangerous criminals are being released from their courthouses, and it’s making it much more difficult for us to ensure that these individuals that have broken our laws, that have perpetuated violence are brought to justice and are gotten out of our country.”
In State College, Myers said the borough can only await further information and stand by its values.
“All we can do for the moment is wait and see if there’s any further clarification,” Myers said. “The one thing we can do is to continue to stand on our values of promoting an open, diverse and welcoming community, and that is exactly what we will continue to do. And the one thing the Trump administration can do is to stop playing with people’s lives.”
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
