Centre County, State College accused by Trump admin of defying immigration law
Both Centre County and State College were listed by the federal government Thursday as being among the more than 500 'sanctuary jurisdictions' accused of defying federal immigration law — although it is unclear why.
Neither the county nor the borough received formal notification of its alleged noncompliance, both entities said Friday in separate written statements to the CDT. However, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) noted in a news release that such notification is forthcoming.
Until then, although the community has largely billed itself as welcoming to all, it's unclear exactly why Centre County and State College were targeted.
'Centre County Government just became aware of this as well,' County Administrator John Franek said in an email. 'The county has not received any type of correspondence from the federal government regarding this matter.'
According to the DHS, both State College and Centre County were listed among the 'sanctuary jurisdictions' — states, counties and cities — that 'protect dangerous criminal aliens from facing consequences and put law enforcement in peril.' The DHS said it determined the 'sanctuary jurisdictions' based on factors like compliance with federal law enforcement, information restrictions and legal protections for immigrants who entered the country illegally.
Again, it's unknown exactly how that applies to Centre County and State College. Borough leadership clarified in January 2017 that it was not a sanctuary city, noting a previous council resolution simply made value statements about immigration. Meanwhile, the county government never passed anything related to 'sanctuary jurisdictions,' a point also made by the Centre County Democratic Committee.
'This is merely a distraction by the current administration from their attacks on the poor, veterans and our communities,' the committee added in a written statement.
Neither the borough nor the county offered any clues as to why they might be included on the DHS' list. They largely declined to answer questions from the CDT, including whether the federal government requested help with immigration enforcement so far this calendar year.
The DHS, which has received pushback across the country, said the extensive list it created was not static and that the status of jurisdictions could change.
'Note that the list can be reviewed and changed at any time and will be updated regularly,' its website read. 'No one should act on this information without conducting their own evaluation of the information.'
In Pennsylvania, five cities and 11 counties were placed on the list, which was created as a direct result of Executive Order 14287, signed on April 28. The primary risk of being on the list is the potential loss of federal funding, which would have a significant economic impact on the communities involved.
Among the five cities on the list are Gettysburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, State College and York. The 11 counties are Adams, Allegheny, Centre, Chester, Clarion, Dauphin, Delaware, Lehigh, Montgomery, Montour and Northampton.
Immigration was a key campaign issue for President Donald Trump, and his administration has promised to annually deport more than a million immigrants. However, based on the current numbers, Trump is on pace to deport less than a quarter of that — and needs a significant boost to approach his goal.
Former President Barack Obama carried out 432,000 deportations in 2013, an average of 36,000 per month, the highest annual total since records were kept. Trump carried out 17,200 deportations this past April.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
18 minutes ago
- CBS News
Pittsburgh hospital mix-up leads to woman finding stranger in mom's hospital bed
A daughter says her mother was mistaken for a patient at a hospital in Pittsburgh last week. "I couldn't believe what was happening to me. I thought I was being punked," said Rae Corrado. Rae Corrado said she left fearing for her mother's well-being on Friday night. Last month, her mom suffered a stroke and was taken to UPMC Presbyterian. Corrado said she was told her 72-year-old mother, Glorida, arrived at UPMC Mercy to rehab from UPMC Presbyterian. However, when she went to her mother's room, the name on the wristband was her mom's, but the person wearing it was not her mom. In a one-on-one interview at the family business on Tuesday in Verona, Corrado said she was terrified. "I don't know if they were giving her pills, if they were giving her medicine," she said. "I told them that wasn't my mother. I went to the chapel and I called Presby, and they said they found my mother." Her mother arrived four hours later at 11 p.m. on Friday. Corrado said she's relieved, but she wants answers. KDKA's Mamie Bah asked, "When you spoke to them finally today, what did they say was the reason for the mix-up?" "That they had a new nurse on staff, and they were sorry for the mix-up," Corrado said. KDKA reached out to UPMC Mercy for comment, but has yet to hear back on Tuesday.
Atlantic
20 minutes ago
- Atlantic
FEMA Is Not Prepared
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Who manages the disaster if the disaster managers are the disaster? That's a question that the people of the United States may have to answer soon. As hurricane season begins in the U.S., the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in disarray. Reuters reported yesterday that acting FEMA head David Richardson suggested during a meeting with employees that he was unaware of the very existence of a hurricane season. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security dismissed the report: 'Despite meanspirited attempts to falsely frame a joke as policy, there is no uncertainty about what FEMA will be doing this Hurricane Season.' The spokesperson added, 'FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.' FEMA employees, and Americans at large, might be forgiven for having doubts. Richardson has only been on the job since early May, when his predecessor was abruptly fired after telling Congress he did not believe that FEMA should be eliminated, as President Donald Trump has contemplated. Richardson is a Marine veteran who had been leading the DHS office that seeks to prevent attacks on the U.S. involving weapons of mass destruction, but he has no experience with disaster management. The Wall Street Journal reported that he had expressed surprise at how broad FEMA's remit is. (The last time FEMA was led by an administrator whose profession was not emergency management was the mid-2000s, under Michael Brown. If you don't know how that turned out, I recommend my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II's award-winning podcast on Hurricane Katrina, Floodlines.) But Richardson surely is aware of hurricane season. In mid-May, CNN obtained an internal document warning that FEMA was badly behind schedule. 'As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready,' it read. (DHS, which oversees FEMA, said the information was 'grossly out of context.') To calm worries at the agency, Richardson held a conference call. 'I would say we're about 80 or 85 percent there,' he told staff, according to ABC News. 'The next week, we will close that gap and get to probably 97 to 98 percent of a plan. We'll never have 100 percent of a plan.' That was not the most reassuring answer, and it looks worse now. The Journal reports that in the same meeting yesterday where Richardson suggested unfamiliarity with hurricane season, he also said the agency would return to its 2024 hurricane-preparedness strategy. How that will work is anyone's guess, given that FEMA has already slashed programs and staff since last year's hurricane season. (FEMA responded to my request for comment with DHS's statement, but did not answer specific questions or make any official available for an interview.) FEMA is not a large part of the federal government by budget or staff, but it is an important one because it directly affects the lives of ordinary Americans in their worst moments. Washington can seem distant and abstract, but disasters are not, and as Hurricane Helene last year demonstrated, even people living in supposed ' climate havens ' are susceptible to extreme weather. In the aftermath of Helene, Trump grasped the widespread public fury at FEMA, which storm victims felt was not responsive enough, fast enough. (Major disasters are major, and even the best-managed response is going to be slower than anyone wants, but no one seems to think this was the best-managed response.) As a candidate, he was quick to say that the Biden administration should do more, but since becoming president again, he has taken steps to ensure that FEMA can and will do less. FEMA is also making recovery harder for the victims of past disasters. In April, the agency declined to declare a major disaster in Washington State, which would free up funding for recovery from a bomb cyclone in November 2024; the state's entire congressional delegation pleaded with him to reconsider. DHS also denied North Carolina more funding for cleanup after Helene, which Governor Josh Stein estimated would cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The president also refused individual federal assistance to nine Arkansas counties struck by tornadoes in March, only reversing the decision after Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as press secretary in Trump's first administration, called the president directly. In the post-FEMA future that Trump has floated, states would be responsible for all disaster recovery. Some conservatives have long argued that states need to shoulder more responsibility for smaller disasters, but most states (and territories such as Puerto Rico) simply don't have the resources to respond to large-scale disasters like Helene. This is, after all, one reason the 13 colonies united in the first place: for mutual aid and protection. The federal government has much greater resources and, unlike most states, is not required to balance its budget annually. That makes it a crucial financial backstop. As Brock Long, who led FEMA during Trump's first term, told me last year, 'All disasters are locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.' FEMA has not, generally, been a partisan agency. Administrators may have different political views, but they try to provide help without consideration for politics. I've spoken with several administrators over the years, and they are consistently professional, don't take wildly differing approaches to their work, and are dedicated to emergency response. When an employee at FEMA was caught telling workers not to help people with Trump signs in their yards, it was rightly a scandal. Yet in his first term, Trump himself reportedly withheld or delayed disaster funds in multiple cases based on partisanship. His reversal on assistance for Arkansas residents raises the specter of a future in which only states whose governors are close to Trump can hope to obtain relief. And yet if FEMA isn't prepared for hurricane season, doesn't have sufficient staff, and is laboring under a president who would like to see it gone, the problem may not be that only the president's allies can get help from the federal government—but rather that no one can. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the family of the man accused of Sunday's attack at a Colorado demonstration for Israeli hostages has been taken into ICE custody. Elon Musk posted on X calling President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act a 'disgusting abomination.' Mount Etna, an active volcano in eastern Sicily, erupted. No injuries resulted. Dispatches Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains the No. 1 rule for understanding Donald Trump. More From The Atlantic Evening Read Nutrition Science's Most Preposterous Result By David Merritt Johns From 2023 Last summer, I got a tip about a curious scientific finding. 'I'm sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this,' my tipster said. Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation's most influential department of nutrition. Culture Break Watch. Our writers and editors recommend five movies they could watch over and over again. P.S. Professional emergency managers are some of the most impressive people I've interviewed. To succeed, they have to be extremely practical, very creative, and totally unflappable. In 2015, while reporting an article on ' maximums of maximums '—the biggest hypothetical catastrophes the nation could face—I asked some sources what their nightmare was. 'What keeps me up is another form of a pandemic, respiratory transmitted, highly lethal virus,' Anthony Fauci told me. (Good prediction, doc.) But when I asked Craig Fugate, then FEMA's administrator, what kept him up at night, he answered in the way that only a veteran of many disasters could: 'Nothing.' — David Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
Associated Press
22 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Trump promises to hike steel and aluminum tariffs to 50% starting Wednesday. Here's what we know
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to hike nearly all of his tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum to a punishing 50% on Wednesday, a move that would hammer businesses from automakers to home builders, and likely push up prices for consumers. Foreign-made steel and aluminum is used in household products like soup cans and paper clips as well as big-ticket items like a stainless-steel refrigerators and cars. Economists warn that the latest tariffs will significantly squeeze the wallets of both companies and shoppers alike. Here's what we know. What's the tariff rate on imported steel and aluminum now? Steel and aluminum imports are currently taxed at 25% — a rate that both metals have faced across the board since March 12 when Trump's order to remove steel exemptions and raise aluminum's levy from his previously-imposed 2018 import taxes went into effect. That's about to double. In a proclamation issued Tuesday, Trump confirmed that the U.S. will begin taxing nearly all steel and aluminum imports at 50% after the clock strikes midnight Wednesday. Steel and aluminum from the U.K., meanwhile, will continue to be levied at 25% due to a recent trade deal. Why is Trump raising these tariffs? Trump says it's all about protecting U.S. industries. He reiterated that argument on Friday, when he first announced the 50% tariff during a visit with steelworkers in Pennsylvania, where he also discussed a 'planned partnership' between U.S. Steel and Japan's Nippon Steel. In his speech at U.S. Steel's Mon Valley Works–Irvin Plant in suburban Pittsburgh, Trump said that the tariff hike would 'further secure the steel industry in the U.S.' Shortly after, he took the same tone when sharing plans to also raise tariffs on imported aluminum. In Tuesday's proclamation, Trump also said that the higher tariffs would ensure that imported steel and aluminum would 'not threaten to impair the national security.' 'In my judgment, the increased tariffs will more effectively counter foreign countries that continue to offload low-priced, excess steel and aluminum in the United States,' he said in the proclamation. How is the industry responding? While some analysts have credited the tariffs Trump imposed during his first term with strengthening domestic production of steel and aluminum, many others have warned that stark new levies can make it difficult for the industry to adjust. Some organizations representing metal workers also note that tariffs aren't the only solution needed to boost U.S. manufacturing. 'While tariffs, used strategically, serve as a valuable tool in balancing the scales, it's essential that we also pursue wider reforms of our global trading system,' David McCall, international president of the United Steelworkers union said in a statement, noting that work must be done 'in collaboration with trusted allies' like Canada — the top exporter of steel and aluminum to the U.S. — to help 'contain the bad actors.' Matt Meenan, vice president of external affairs at the Aluminum Association, added that the trade group 'appreciates President Trump's continued focus on strengthening the U.S. aluminum industry,' but that 'tariffs alone will not increase U.S. primary aluminum production.' 'We also need consistent, predictable trade and tariff policy to plan for current and future investment,' Meenan said. What kinds of products could be impacted by heightened steel and aluminum tariffs? A range of businesses that rely on foreign-made steel and aluminum have already begun feeling the impacts of Trump's previously-imposed levies. But the latest anticipated hikes could drive up costs even more. Steel and aluminum are used in a range of products like washing machines, consumer electronics and cars. Much of the auto industry relies on a global supply chain. And even if you aren't in the market to buy a new vehicle, repairs could involve parts that use imports of either metal, driving up overall maintenance and ownership costs. In the grocery aisle, steel and aluminum are ubiquitous in the packaging for many foods, including canned tuna, soup and nuts. Experts warn that hiking import taxes on these materials could led to higher grocery prices overall, further straining consumers wallets. The aluminum and metal tariffs also carry wider implications for construction and transportation as a whole, as many key building parts and materials are made with these metals. Economists further warn of spillover impacts. Even if a product isn't directly packaged in steel or aluminum, there could be higher costs to build the shelf it's sold on, for example, or truck used to transport it to the store. And all of that could trickle down to the consumer down the road. If foreign competition becomes 'priced out' due to these new tariffs, U.S. steel and aluminum producers may also find room to raise their own prices. As a result, even companies that don't buy these foreign metals could end up paying more. Steel prices have already climbed 16% since Trump became president in mid-January, according to the government's Producer Price Index. And as of March 2025, steel cost $984 a metric ton in the U.S., significantly higher than than in Europe ($690) or China ($392), per the U.S. Commerce Department. Will there be any exceptions? The new 50% tariff rate will apply to nearly all steel and aluminum coming into the U.S. from other countries. But the U.K., which recently reached a sweeping trade agreement with the U.S., will see an exception. As part of trade deal reached between the two nations on May 8, the U.K. said that the U.S. had agreed to eliminate its current 25% duties on British steel and aluminum down to zero. That exemption had yet to go into effect in the weeks following — but in his proclamation issued Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that it was 'necessary and appropriate' to implement the deal, and would 'accordingly provide different treatment' for these metals coming from the U.K. Per Trump's proclamation, the duty on British steel and aluminum will now stay 25%. But that rates could be adjusted starting on July 9 if the U.S. government determines that Britain has not complied with the framework. Trump's planned hikes for steel and aluminum tariffs for the rest of the world could spark retaliation from other trading partners. In response to levies imposed on these metals earlier in the year, for example, the European Union previously outlined countermeasures. The 27-nation bloc later delayed those actions until July 14 in efforts to ease negotiations, but said on Monday that was preparing a list of measures to enact if a trade deal with the U.S. crumbles. _______ AP Writers Jill Lawless in London, Josh Boak and Michelle Price in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
