Allentown adopts policy of non-collaboration with ICE as part of welcoming city movement

Yahoo

07-02-2025

A view of the skyline in Allentown, Pa. (Getty Images)
Eleven years ago Allentown was at the center of a federal court ruling that put local governments on notice that they could face legal jeopardy for collaborating with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania's third-largest city formally adopted a policy that bars police and other city employees from supporting or assisting ICE and other immigration officials unless ordered by a federal judge.
In unanimously approving the ordinance, Allentown joins Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania communities on the path to becoming a 'Welcoming City' and part of a growing movement across the country to make local government more accessible to immigrant residents.
'It makes it so that people who are living here undocumented in Allentown and are not committing crimes can live without fear of themselves and their family members being rounded up,' Allentown council member Ce-Ce Gerlach, who sponsored the legislation, told the Capital-Star.
Allentown, in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania, is the state's largest city with a majority non-white population. More than half of the city's roughly 125,000 residents have Hispanic or Latino heritage and one-fifth of the city's roughly 125,000 residents are foreign-born, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
With President Donald Trump's campaign promises to conduct mass deportations and news of ICE raids indiscriminately taking in immigrants regardless of criminal history or status in cities across the nation, Allentown's residents are on edge, Gerlach said.
At the start of Wednesday's council meeting, however, Gerlach's bill was 'doomed to fail' she said, with Mayor Matt Tuerk and several council members in opposition. After more than two hours of testimony and a compromise amendment, the bill passed. One councilmember told Gerlach he was moved by testimony that children in the community were living in fear as a result of the politics surrounding Trump's immigration policies.
Tuerk said he opposed the ordinance even though he embraced its intent. He told the Capital-Star his primary objection was that Gerlach's bill would have tied the city's internal policies to the mission of a nonprofit organization called Welcoming America, which advances policies to help cities become 'more prosperous by ensuring everyone belongs.'
In addition to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Erie, Lancaster, State College, the Allegheny County borough of Dormont, and Allegheny County have received certification from the group. Gerlach said leaders from neighboring Bethlehem and nearby Easton have started movements to pass similar legislation since Gerlach introduced her proposal in December. Tuerk said he dropped his opposition to Gerlach's proposal after it was amended to make seeking Welcoming America certification optional rather than mandatory.
'I had already begun the process of establishing certification for the city of Allentown with Welcoming America, but I didn't want it to become a matter of policy through an ordinance,' Tuerk said.
The ordinance doesn't change the city's practices, Tuerk said, noting that Allentown police do not collaborate with ICE.
Allentown and Lehigh County were defendants in a lawsuit filed in 2010 by a New Jersey-born man of Puerto Rican descent who was arrested in a drug raid on the jobsite where he was working.
Despite telling police and Lehigh County jail staff that he was an American citizen, Ernesto Galarza was held for a weekend under an immigration detainer issued by ICE.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania sued the county and city on Galarza's behalf and won a decision from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that immigration detainers issued by ICE are non-binding requests and that local agencies may share liability if they participate in wrongful immigration detentions. He settled his claims against Lehigh County and Allentown for about $150,000.
(Galarza was also acquitted on the drug charge, but the episode dogged him for years as a result of an error by court officials.)
The appeals court ruling led Lehigh County and many others across the state and country to change how they handled requests from ICE, with many adopting a practice of notifying the federal agency only when a person was being released from custody.
Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, said that since her organization and the ACLU collaborated with Temple University's Sheller Center for Social Justice to survey Pennsylvania county jails and local police in 2018, policies have shifted back toward cooperation with ICE in some places while others are phasing out their agreements.
Only Clinton and Pike counties still have agreements with ICE to house detainees in their jails, while Clearfield County has a contract with ICE to operate a former federal prison as an immigrant detention center. The county pays the for-profit prison operator GEO Group to run the Moshannon Valley Processing Center.
Community organizer Josie Lopez said Allentown's ordinance benefits the city in several ways. Financially, it protects the city from future legal costs and verdicts under the Galarza ruling and it ensures that city funds are directed to achieving the city's objectives of reducing and solving crime, rather than the federal government's objectives.
It also codifies the policy against police collaboration with ICE. That helps members of the community whose immigration status is unauthorized or uncertain trust that they can report crime without endangering themselves.
'The vulnerable communities that exist within all of this become more vulnerable when they live in fear and the people that are actually violent prey on that fear,' Lopez said.
Welcoming America certification also requires that cities have other policies in place beyond the law enforcement element. Cities must show that their services are accessible in languages used by the immigrant population and that immigrants are able to engage with the community in other respects. The results include families who are more resilient and financially stable and communities that are more prosperous and use fewer municipal resources as a result, Rivera said.
'Having good policies on the books is a good first step, but how you are implementing them, how you're putting them into practice … that's what people can see and touch and feel,' Rivera said.