In a blistering 10-minute diatribe questioning President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan called on county residents Wednesday to publicly stand against warrantless arrests of immigrants and citizens.
Gaughan cited cases in Minnesota and Dunmore that he portrayed as overreach by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. He warned against letting ICE ignore people’s civil rights.
“If we don't stand up — and there are people standing up — then the next time we speak out, it'll be us,” Gaughan warned. “They'll be snatching up us off the street, because we're Democrats, because we wrote something on social media that might seem extreme ... I think that's the course that we're currently heading down.”
Gaughan succeeded in convincing fellow commissioners Thom Welby and Chris Chermak to allow a legal review of county policies and procedures on managing ICE requests for information and cooperation.
Gaughan’s speech criticizing ICE’s tactics marked his latest criticism of the Trump administration during a commissioners meeting. Several times in the last year, Gaughan criticized administration cuts to social services and other programs that aid county residents.
'Violence and chaos'
Gaughan said two highly controversial immigration-related events in Minnesota prompted him to bring up immigration. In one, an ICE agent shot and killed a Renee Good, a Minnesota woman monitoring the agency’s activities. The Trump administration contends the agent acted in self-defense.
Gaughan decried the ICE-inspired “violence and chaos.”
“A United States citizen was killed in cold blood, shot in the face during a federal operation in Minneapolis, raising serious questions about tactics, transparency and accountability,” he said. “Others have been detained, questioned or intimidated by ICE not because they had committed crimes, but because they were suspected, misidentified or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. There have been many instances of ICE harassing United States citizens just because they aren't white or they have an accent. There have been instances of American citizens being detained and even mistakenly deported.”
On Sunday, ICE agents led a Laos native, a naturalized American citizen, out of his home at gunpoint. In bitter cold, ChongLy “Scott” Thao had only his underwear on. ICE released him hours later. Gaughan called that “shocking.”
'Unchecked enforcement power'
“That should stop every single one of us cold. What needs to be made absolutely clear, and this is why I'm speaking out today, is that what we are witnessing is not limited to undocumented immigrants, and it's not limited to the big cities in the United States,” he said. “This, in my opinion, is about unchecked enforcement power. This is about fear replacing due process, and this is about ordinary people, including United States citizens, being swept up in something that is growing more aggressive and less accountable by the day.”
Gaughan said he spoke up to warn county residents rather than to debate immigration policy or “score political points.”
“Because history teaches us that when government agents operate with broad authority, minimal oversight and a climate of fear, the danger is never confined to just one group,” he said.
Bringing up Nazis
He likened the crackdown to Nazi Germany, a comparison that he said he wasn’t making “lightly.”
“When we look back at some of the darkest chapters in human history, including Nazi Germany, we see how rapidly state enforcement, unchecked and unaccountable, can turn from protecting citizens to terrorizing them,” he said. “Ordinary citizens believed at first that it would only affect others. By the time they realize it wouldn't, it was too late ... When any government begins to treat people as less than fully protected members of society, we all become less free.”
He noted the county’s history, “built by immigrants, Irish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Latino and so many others.”
“People who came here seeking freedom and opportunity and who made this community what it is. Today that legacy matters, and it's not abstract for us,” he said.
What happened in Dunmore
He recalled ICE’s Oct. 29 arrest of a Honduras native and his daughter in Dunmore.
“A member of our community, a hard-working gentleman, was snatched off the street, pushed off his bicycle during an immigration enforcement action and was deported along with his young daughter,” Gaughan said. “That story didn't dominate national headlines, but it lives on in this community, in whispered conversations in fear passed from parent to child, and in the quiet decision not to go out, not to speak up and not to draw attention.”
'Snatched up by ICE'
Gaughan, who said he lives among many immigrants in South Scranton, also related a firsthand experience. Recently, he ran into a woman he hadn’t seen in a while. The woman, now a naturalized citizen, was born in Mexico.
He asked her if she was sick. She told him she fears coming out of her house.
“She's afraid she's going to get snatched up by ICE,” he said. “She's afraid she's going to get deported back to Mexico, even though she's a United States citizen and so is her entire family. These stories never get reported. They never make it into press releases or court filings. They only surface when someone is already gone.”
The fear of deportation, detention or harassment, even if someone is a citizen, inspires only fear, he said.
“I take that seriously, and I think every one of us in this county should, because fear like that doesn't stay contained, it spreads. It silences people. It stops victims from reporting crimes, it stops witnesses from cooperating with law enforcement, and it makes entire communities less safe,” Gaughan said. “And it is precisely why I believe our county officials have a moral obligation to seriously examine how we interact with federal enforcement actions by ICE that impact our residents, regardless of immigration status.”
What should the county do?
Recently, he said, an ICE agent called the county’s 911 director for information “looking for information on an individual.”
Gaughan asked county solicitor Paul James Walker to develop clear guidance on how county employees should manage approaches by ICE agents.
“Is there room under the law to limit cooperation when it may jeopardize community safety and trust?” he asked. “Are we required to honor ICE detainers that are not backed by a judicial warrant? What information do our departments collect that ICE could try to pull directly or indirectly? What policies can we adopt to minimize unnecessary collection of immigration-related data in the first place? What access if any, should ICE have to county facilities and county property if agents show up at a county building, what is the protocol? Who is authorized to speak, who can deny access absent a warrant?”
He directly addressed local immigrants.
“I want you to hear this clearly. You have rights. You have protections under the United States Constitution, and you do not lose those rights because someone thinks you look like something else,” he said. “My kids go to John F. Kennedy School in southside. Most of their friends are immigrants, or their parents are immigrants. These people are scared. They're scared of what they are seeing on the news and what's going on across the country, and that's something that the families of Lackawanna County deserve better than.”
ICE’s behavior isn’t “about left or right,” he said.
“This is about right and wrong. It's about simple human decency. We cannot allow fear to become a tool of governance, and we cannot allow force to replace restraint,” he said.
Welby, Chermak respond to Gaughan
In Lackawanna County, Welby — a Democrat like Gaughan — echoed his colleague.
“It's insane to see the way some people are treated,” he said. “This is the United States of America. It's not communist Russia from the '30s.”
Chermak called the shooting “awful” and said “nobody deserves that,” but declined to criticize the ICE agent who shot the woman or say ICE has gone overboard.
He called on ICE agents and local law enforcement to talk about avoiding showdowns.
“I think what it's going to take is they need to have everybody has to talk,” he said. “You can't have one side fighting the other side. Nobody's right, nobody's right, nobody's wrong. It's a disaster. It's gotten way out of hand.”
Actions in other Pa. counties
Gaughan's remarks come as some other counties in Pennsylvania already are seeking changes in the way they interact with ICE and other federal agencies, as other public broadcasters have reported.
New Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler last week officially withdrew his office from a collaboration agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, WHYY reported, citing public safety concerns and the need to reestablish trust between local law enforcement and the county’s more than 50,000 immigrant residents.
Lehigh County officials have started the legal process of evicting the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from a county-owned office space after saying the federal government went nearly three years without paying rent, lehighvalleynews.com reported this week.
According to the public broadcaster, Lehigh County sources say the space in Allentown has primarily been used by Homeland Security Investigations agents assisting in efforts to curb human trafficking throughout the Lehigh Valley.
But Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley and Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel focused much of their attention on ICE during a Tuesday news conference. While HSI is a part of ICE, it is not involved in the deportation or removal of people illegally in the country, lehighvalleynews.com reported.
The agency's website describes HSI Criminal Investigators as "the detectives of ICE."
Lehigh County has an obligation not to work with the department or its agencies to avoid being complicit in its actions, Siegel and Pinsley said.
"We can give them a taste of their own medicine. We're going to deport ICE," Pinsley said at the afternoon press gathering.
U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, R-Lehigh Valley — Pinsley's potential opponent in the November election — accused him of putting politics over public safety, criticizing Pinsley for failing to negotiate with Homeland Security in good faith.
"At the end of the day, they didn't pay their bills, so they can say whatever they want. They very clearly haven't paid their bills in three years," Pinsley said.
