Immigration crackdown spreads fear, uncertainty across Pennsylvania communities

For nearly 20 years, a Pittsburgh restaurant owner has served up her native Andean cuisine to a constant stream of hungry diners. Business grew as more and more Latino immigrants settled in the Steel City, grateful to congregate over platters of rotisserie chicken, fried plantains and yuca.

But since late January, when the Trump administration directed more aggressive action by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the restaurant’s business has collapsed. “When there were raids, there was gossip that ICE was in my restaurant,” said the restaurateur, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But it was just panic. When people here see a police car or a regular traffic stop, they think it’s ICE. Everything is ICE. The word spreads: ‘Don’t go out in the neighborhood today!’

“It’s so much bad communication,” she added, fretting over her restaurant’s diminished prospects.

Across the state in Bucks County, Sheriff Fred Harran lamented a similar anxiety and miscommunication from immigrant constituents around his collaboration with ICE to ferret out criminal aliens. A 40-year law-enforcement veteran, Harran, a Republican, has seen his reelection campaign challenged by protests from immigrant activists, who equate his local approach – unfairly, he says – with the aggressive federal raids that have spooked many non-citizens.

“We’re not putting officers out with ICE, going on raids with ICE,” he said. “We are only looking at people that have committed crimes and that have active warrants, who have eluded law enforcement.” He explained that he is getting certified to access the ICE database to locate those criminals.

As a Jew who lost cousins to Nazi brutality during World War II and whose father, then a U.S. Army physician, helped liberate Holocaust survivors, Harran added that he is sensitive to the concerns of minority groups. “But calling me a Nazi – me, a Jewish kid from New York City – does not solve problems,” he said.

Yet nuance often gets lost in the stew of fear, confusion and misinformation that has permeated immigrant communities around the commonwealth ever since Trump’s inauguration. After a campaign rife with anti-immigrant rhetoric, many expected high-profile raids, tighter border controls and the rollback of asylum programs. But a series of precedent-toppling moves has spawned a chilling climate of uncertainty amid even documented residents who previously thought they were untouchable.

These moves include revoking the valid visas of foreign students at the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges, and deporting green-card holders over long-settled past infractions – including a dozen members of Harrisburg’s Bhutanese refugee community.

The administration has also shocked observers by detaining foreign students over their political expression, rescinding a longstanding policy against conducting immigration raids in sensitive locations like churches and schools, and breaking with historical precedent by having the Internal Revenue Service share information with federal immigration authorities.

For the first time in four years – or, roughly, since Trump last left office – the number of immigrants detained within the U.S. by ICE now eclipses the total arrested at the nation’s borders.

“Every single day is something new,” said Mónica Ruiz, a social worker and the executive director of Pittsburgh’s Casa San Jose, a Latino resource center. On the day she spoke in late April, the community was reeling from an early-hours raid on a popular taquería, where ICE detained 10 people and, Ruiz said, destroyed the restaurant’s door in the process.

“It’s a total disregard for our democracy – attacks on so many different aspects of the way that our country runs,” she added. “And it’s scary to me, because our forefathers fought in wars to prevent these things from happening here, the way they do in other countries.”

The wave of unprecedented actions has undermined confidence among foreign-born Pennsylvanians to such an extent that it has wholly transformed entire neighborhoods. From Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, immigrants report that formerly bustling restaurants and churches in their commuhnities are now largely empty; teachers have signaled that some foreign-born students have stopped showing up at school, and many non-citizens say they are afraid to leave the house to run errands.

Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Trump’s immigration crackdown is the way it has managed to catch so many off guard – even those immigrants and their advocates who thought they were prepared for his administration’s agenda.

The aggressive tactics “took people by surprise,” observed Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas, a Democrat and former pastor, who was horrified when his Bhutanese constituents were recently deported for matters that had been resolved through the courts years before. “These individuals came here on refugee status … and usually there’s a pretty high bar for being deported with a country of origin that tried to ethnically cleanse them. But this administration seems pretty set on doing that.”

Family fears

The March removal of 15 members of Harrisburg’s Bhutanese community – 12 were reported, while three remain in detention – has hit hard. “I understand that President Trump wants to deport illegal aliens, and those who have a serious criminal conviction,” said Tilak Niroula, the chair of the board of the Bhutanese Community in Harrisburg. “But for our people, we do not have a country to go to.”

As members of Bhutan’s persecuted Nepali-speaking minority, the group was forcibly relocated by a hostile government and languished, stateless, for 20 years in Nepali refugee camps. In 2007, then-President George W. Bush spearheaded a bipartisan, decade-long effort to settle the refugees in America.

The majority of those refugees, some 50,000, live in Central Pennsylvania. Many own or work in home health care businesses, caring for the region’s growing geriatric population – and helping to ease critical labor shortages. In fact, Niroula said, many felt secure enough in their settled status that they voted for Trump.

The pretext for the detentions was that the immigrants had criminal records for past offenses including DUI, public drunkenness and illegal fishing. Once they touch down in Bhutan, they face immediate deportation to a third country – a betrayal, said Douglas, of the compact the U.S. government made when it brought them here.

“Many had already litigated their criminal issues, had already served time and had re-entered society, making something of their lives,” said Douglas. He explained that substance abuse was “a thread” running through the early adjustment years of many traumatized Bhutanese, who have since received rehabilitative services and moved on. “We would argue that the system works. Our courts have the ability to adjudicate these cases appropriately, and they already have.

“I believe, as elected officials, we’re called to stand up to bullies,” he added. “Unfortunately, that’s what I’ve been tasked with … We’re making former refugees (into) refugees again. It’s hard to see it as anything other than bullying a community that’s already been through so much.”

Niroula concurred. “We were stateless for two decades. And finally, we call this country our home,” he said, adding that he owns a home health business, serves on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Advisory Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Affairs, and is a trustee of the Dauphin County Library.

“These individuals have children born in this country. Their families are in panic, not knowing whether they will be able to see their loved ones again.” He described many Bhutanese Pennsylvanians as traumatized by the recent actions, afraid to participate in social or cultural activities.

Wrongs, no rights

In Pittsburgh, Ruiz described the recent detention of one local man – a documented asylum applicant – who, she said, was stopped while driving home late and tired after work. “The officer said he was drunk, and gave him the field sobriety test, which he passed because he wasn’t drunk,” Ruiz recalled. “The officer still didn’t believe him, so they took him to the hospital to get blood work done, which again proved that he wasn’t under the influence of any mind-altering substances.”

The man was finally released. But early the next morning, just before dawn, ICE agents pounded on the door of his house, according to Ruiz. “The wife was saying, ‘Show me the warrant.’ And they said, ‘We’ll show it to you once you open the door.’ She told me, ‘I really felt like I had my documentation, so they wouldn’t do anything,’” Ruiz related. “As soon as she opened the door, they grabbed him – in front of his family, his small children, making a scene in their community.”

Detentions like the one Ruiz describes lay bare the inadequacy of the pre-inauguration “Know Your Rights” strategy, in which advocacy organizations educated immigrants on their constitutional and legal rights.

Distress signals

Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, ticked off how life has changed since the crackdowns: Patients skipping medical appointments. Workers shifting to cash arrangements, so they don’t have to file taxes. Business owners shutting down early when employees don’t show up. After-school programs with few attendees. “There has been this freezing effect for months now,” said Rivera.

The Pittsburgh restaurant owner and her husband, a permanent resident, have fretted lately over whether accepting local construction jobs is worth the risk. “He always carries his green card,” said the woman, who came to Pennsylvania a quarter-century ago for graduate school and has since naturalized. “But you work with different crews, and you never know if they’re here legally or not – or what happens if ICE shows up.”

Rivera pointed out that while some ICE actions are more aggressive than before, others have been quietly taking place for years.

“Many of the things the country is suddenly paying attention to, we’ve seen ICE do for a long time – and it’s now being codified and legitimized,” Rivera explained. “The surveillance of people online – they were doing that for a decade. Racially profiling immigrants … Indiscriminately arresting people, deporting people who are not supposed to be deported, or deporting them to countries that they’re not from.”

Like everyone interviewed for this article, however, Rivera was taken back by the shattering of norms. “We’re seeing new ways in which ICE is acquiring data to find folks and arrest them … Students having their visas ended because of political dissent is definitely new, or forcing the IRS to share data.”

Experts say the latter move betrays the good faith of immigrants who have paid their taxes while receiving no benefits – many of whom do so in the hopes of eventually correcting their legal status – by revealing the personal data that now makes them targets.

Rivera’s organization has stepped up pressure on lawmakers at both the local and state levels to resist pressure to cooperate with hardline directives. Across the commonwealth, a number of municipalities have signaled their resolution to prioritize inclusivity by designating themselves as Welcoming Cities – or to refrain from allowing local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE detentions, an approach typically known as a sanctuary city.

But Rivera and other advocates say those designations lack teeth – and in April, the president signed an executive order to target sanctuary cities, with the goal of slashing federal funding to municipalities deemed non-compliant with federal immigration directives.

Vocal locals

In recent months, tensions have flared in one Pennsylvania county after another, as immigrant advocates clash with more conservative neighbors over whether to adopt pro-immigrant designations. One of the more vocal efforts has been in Montgomery County, the state’s third-most-populous, where County Commissioner Neil Makhija is the first Asian American to hold his position.

“My parents came from Mumbai, a city of 22 million, to a Pennsylvania town of 5,000,” he reflected. “My father was one of the only obstetricians in rural Carbon County. He delivered 8,000 babies for women who might otherwise have had to travel much farther for care.”

Makhija declined to say whether his suburban Philadelphia municipality would become a Welcoming City or to pledge non-cooperation with ICE, as many constituents have lobbied for. But he emphasized the county’s commitment to inclusivity, noting that his administration hired Montgomery’s first-ever director of immigrant affairs and translated local voting materials into nine languages.

“We’re doing everything we can,” he said. “Pennsylvania, by the way, would be losing population were it not for immigrants.”

That prospect has not deterred some municipalities from casting their lot with the Trump administration. In addition to Harran, the sheriffs of Lancaster, Bradford and Franklin counties have indicated they would collaborate with ICE – though the details of those collaborations may vary, with several different tiers of participation available to local law enforcement.

Neither ICE nor the sheriffs of Lancaster, Bradford and Franklin counties responded to repeated requests for clarification on the exact nature of their local actions.

Andrea Lawton, a Guatemala-born immigrant advocate from Doylestown, described an increasingly fraught atmosphere as a gulf of distrust widens between newcomers and the native-born.

“It is tense,” said Lawton, who has worked for Immigrant Rights Action and now runs a Spanish-language resource group, La Red de Liderazgo (“The Leadership Network”). She added that her Latino neighbors “are very frustrated. They say, ‘We’re here to work. We are the ones serving and making everything possible for white people. Why are they going to send us home?’

“And I will say that not all white people are against the community – of course, we have a lot of allies,” she continued. One of them is her American-born husband; the couple met when he studied abroad in Guatemala. Lawton has lived in the U.S. since 2006, raising two children in a community where the workforce is predominantly immigrants from Central America.

After her 13-year-old son was out sick from school recently, classmates told him they thought he’d been picked up by ICE. “He’s worried about me going to rallies – saying, ‘I don’t want anything to happen to you,’” she related.

But while many Latino communities have effectively gone into hiding – witness the recent decision to cancel Philadelphia’s annual Mexican Carnaval De Puebla, citing concerns over ICE presence – Lawton galvanized her Bucks County neighbors for a recent rally against Harran’s reelection.

“The new administration is just terrible with all of this hatred, all this racist propaganda,” she said of Trump. “Now it’s the sheriff.”

For his part, Harran is frustrated that his own message has been conflated with an increasingly black-and-white, sensationalized discourse. “I am not Donald J. Trump. I’m Frederick A. Harran,” he said. “The men and women under my office will follow my rules and regulations, not the rules and regulations of ICE.”

As he runs for reelection, Harran said he is meeting with immigrants and any other group willing to listen to his explanations for why he, as a law enforcement officer, should avail himself of any available resources to locate criminals. “They’re going to see, because I’ve promised to be totally transparent,” he said. “I told these groups, if we take somebody into custody … I’ll let you know who it is, why they’re wanted by immigration, and what laws they’ve broken in the United States.

“We’re not looking at hard workers, at pizza shop owners, at schoolchildren on the playground,” he added.” We’re not saying, ‘Oh, that person looks like they’re illegal.’ That’s called profiling. And you can’t do that here. It’s America, for crying out loud.”