Reporting intern Elena Eisenstadt wrote this story.

HARRISBURG— Local and state law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania are ramping up their partnerships with ICE, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

ICE is relying more on local law enforcement to increase detentions as it receives billions in new funding from the federal budget bill. This includes $2 billion allocated to local and state law enforcement agencies for immigration enforcement. 

Some of these agencies are part of the 287(g) program, which allows ICE to authorize local law enforcement agencies to carry out federal immigration enforcement actions. ICE says these relationships are important to executing its arrests, detentions and deportations.

County executives, commissioners and sheriffs often see these programs as an "opportunity to bring money in,” said Diana Robinson, co-executive director at the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road Pennsylvania. 

Many counties in Pennsylvania ended previous partnerships with ICE in 2014, after a court case where a federal judge ruled that local governments were liable for ICE mistakes. The case stemmed from when a U.S. citizen was illegally detained by law enforcement in Lehigh County. 

But ICE partnerships have more than doubled across the country since Trump took office for a second term. 

Thirty agencies in Pennsylvania have joined ICE partnerships this year. Thirteen of those agencies signed up in July alone. 

Local law enforcement can partner with ICE through a Warrant Service Officer program, a Jail Enforcement model or a Task Force model. Three partnerships in Pennsylvania follow the Warrant Service Officer model, while the other 27 partnerships follow the Task Force model.

According to ICE, any local law enforcement agency interested in the partnership can submit a letter of interest and Memorandum of Agreement to ICE to be considered for admission. Local agencies choose which officers will participate in the program. Those officers must pass ICE’s eligibility requirements and take part in ICE training for their specific model.

In Bradford County, the Sheriff's office entered into a Warrant Service Officer Program on March 26, meaning ICE authorized its law enforcement officers to serve warrants to undocumented people in Bradford's jails. 

Bradford County Commissioner Daryl Miller is aware of the partnership between the County’s sheriff and ICE, but he does not know about the details of their relationship, he said. 

As of this week, the County Commissioner's Office had not passed a resolution or ordinance approving the Sheriff’s partnership with ICE. 

Still, “I don't have a problem with the Sheriff's department being involved in an agreement working with ICE,” Miller said. "It’s a law enforcement effort. We want to be sure that people are following our laws nationally."

In Erie County, the Greene Township Constable’s Office entered a Task Force Model partnership with ICE on July 15, meaning they could deputize officers to “enforce limited immigration authority with ICE oversight during their routine police duties,” according to ICE. 

The Township’s constable, Mark Biletnikoff, declined to comment on the partnership, saying he was worried about his safety. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there about this,” he said.

The District Justice Office and Greene Township Office were both unaware of the partnership when contacted this week.  

287(g) partnerships have a broader issue with transparency, Robinson said. “The agreements are usually between county sheriffs and county executives without any approval or accountability to the local community and government.” 

In addition to a lack of transparency, critics have accused local law enforcement agencies using a Task Force 287(g) model of civil rights violations for years.

“They turn local police into ICE enforcement agents who receive little training and are incentivized to use racial profiling tactics, mostly on black and brown families,” Robinson said.

Trump brought back ICE’s task force model this year after former President Obama canceled it following a pattern of racial profiling found in the program. 

Accusations of abuse in the remaining partnership models persisted even before Trump’s reelection. At least 65% of partnering agencies had recorded civil rights violation patterns in 2022, according to an ACLU report. 

The ACLU challenged the Bucks County Sheriff in a lawsuit this June, arguing that the Sheriff's ICE Task Force partnership is illegal. The Sheriff entered the partnership without approval from the County’s governing body — its board of Commissioners — and is diverting local resources to federal immigration enforcement, according to the suit. 

Sixteen agencies nationwide currently have pending partnerships with ICE. The three pending partnerships from Pennsylvania have all applied to participate in the 287(g) Task Force model.