To this day, Lou Barletta remembers Carly Snyder by name.
Barletta never met her, but Snyder’s father told him the story of how his daughter died more than 20 years ago. Her father came up to him after a town hall he hosted many years ago on illegal immigration.
IMMIGRATION: AMERICAN DREAM OR NIGHTMARE?
This three-day WVIA News series focuses on the effects of federal immigration policy on Northeast and Central Pennsylvania.
● TODAY: The nation's clash over immigration policy is felt in region. Also: 287(g) agreements explained.
● SUNDAY: A young Scranton mother faces future after husband was deported.
● MONDAY: Planned Pa. detention centers, including one in Schuylkill County, raise concerns. Also: Pike County finds ICE detentions lucrative.
● KEYSTONE EDITION BROADCAST: Watch our panel discussion at 7 p.m. Monday, May 11 on WVIA-TV.
“She was 20 years old, studying to be a veterinarian. Her next-door neighbor was in the country illegally. He was from Honduras,” Barletta said. “He was arrested in Houston, left go (by immigration authorities), came to Pennsylvania, broke in his daughter's house. And as he told me the story, he teared up.”
The illegal immigrant “stabbed her 36 or 37 times,” Barletta said.
“She had knife wounds in her back and on her hands as she was trying to protect herself, and she bled to death on the floor in the kitchen,” Barletta said. “And he said, ‘I just came to shake your hand because you're speaking for Carly.’ And I never forgot that story.”
Barletta, a former Hazleton mayor and U.S. congressman — and an advocate for tough immigration enforcement long before that day — incorporated the story into his election campaign stump speeches.
In the debate on the effects of President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown, Barletta believes, “stories like that ... are overlooked sometimes when people talk about illegal immigration.”
Not by President Donald Trump or his administration. The president and his Department of Homeland Security often highlight stories of immigrant violence, drug ferrying and human trafficking as his U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aggressively pursue the deportation of people who entered the country illegally.
Crackdown critics say Trump routinely exaggerates the criminality of immigrants whose residency status remains unresolved.
“That's not the reality,” said Jenny Gonzalez, an immigrant advocate who lives in Scranton. “I'm not saying that there aren’t bad immigrants. Of course, there are. There are in any group, but we can't generalize and stereotype an entire group of people ... (Most of) these individuals (being arrested) are contributing members of society.”
Federal statistics show ICE has arrested many immigrants who’ve committed no crimes, despite Trump saying agents target “the worst of the worst.”
Of all the 60,311 people detained nationwide as of April 4, about 70.8%, have not been convicted of a crime, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects and tracks immigration enforcement data from the federal government.
“Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations,” the clearinghouse says.
Some did do worse.
Carly's killer still in prison
Fredil O. Fuentes, himself 24 at the time, pleaded guilty to the June 10, 2005, homicide. In court, he claimed he was “crazy” high on crack cocaine and marijuana.
A Northumberland County judge determined Fuentes was guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to spend his life in prison. He’s in the state prison in Dallas, according to online records.
“The death penalty would have been too good for him,” Alice Snyder, Carly’s mom, said at the time, The Sunbury Daily Item reported.
'It's not because we want to be mean'
Crackdown advocate Ira Mehlman isn’t moved by the argument that many undocumented immigrants aren’t criminals and the crackdown should be limited to criminals.
“You know, immigration laws exist for a reason,” said Mehlman, media director for the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, one of the country’s leading pro-enforcement organizations. “It's not because we want to be mean and keep people out. It's because we recognize, at least tacitly, that it has an impact on everybody in American society. It affects virtually every aspect of life that people consider important.”
When large numbers of immigrants arrive uninvited, their children fill up local classrooms, affecting “your children’s education,” they take jobs at lower wages and fill up affordable housing, Mehlman said.
“All sorts of things, you go down the list,” he said.
Immigration advocates say these concerns are vastly overblown. Often, they say, immigrants, legal or illegal, do jobs that citizens want no part of, pay taxes, live productive, quiet family-oriented lives and behave as society demands. ICE's arrests often unnecessarily rip apart families, they say.
Many Americans simply don't understand the hardships or dangers of immigrants' former countries, said Ushu Mukelo, founder and president of the Congolese Community of Scranton.
"The only reason why we came to this country is because it offered safety before everything else," Mukelo said. "So I do think that maybe some suggestions from this current federal government are in good faith. But there are things where I think there is excess. Refugees go through a process. There are immigrant groups here that somehow have gone through a process. Not everyone just crossed the border."
Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan, who led a successful fight to restrict county cooperation with immigration agents, sees a crackdown tinged with racism, citing Trump’s statements about Mexican rapists and immigrants “poisoning” the nation’s blood.
“So, one Mexican immigrant commits a crime. That means that we don't let people from Mexico into the United States anymore?” Gaughan said. “It's let's just fear everything. Fear the immigrants, fear this, fear that. Let's just be scared.”
American history demands better than scapegoating immigrants, said Gaughan, a former American government teacher.
“We're turning ourselves away from what now is a global society,” the commissioner said. “I think anytime that America has been successful, we have embraced immigration. We have said exactly what's on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, you're hungry, you're homeless, you know, give us people so that we can give them a second chance.”
Trump embraced Barletta's vision
The Trump administration’s crackdown resembles what Barletta envisioned when he was Hazleton’s mayor and turned the city into a hotbed of immigration controversy in 2006.
Before he learned who Carly Snyder was, Barletta dealt with the murder of Derek Kichline as mayor.
Two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged with shooting and killing Kichline in May 2006. The case was dropped more than a year later because one witness changed her testimony and another was deported.
Regardless, a month after the shooting, Kichline’s death spurred Barletta into action.
Upset with the failure of President George W. Bush, a fellow Republican, to help control illegal immigration, Barletta pushed through the City Council ordinances that restricted renting or hiring people illegally in the United States.
“I’m fed up. I’m sick of it. This is a cry that will be heard all the way to Washington,” he said at the time, according to published reports.
Barletta wound up featured on “60 Minutes” and became a national spokesman for tougher immigration enforcement. He won a seat in the U.S. House in 2010 and later earned Trump’s confidence by endorsing him before many other Republican members of Congress did. Trump embraced Barletta's immigration vision and offered him the job of labor secretary, but Barletta turned it down.
Meanwhile, a federal judge ruled Hazleton’s immigration ordinances unconstitutional. Judge James Munley eventually ordered Hazleton to pay almost $1.4 million in legal fees to groups that successfully challenged the ordinances.
“For someone like myself who wished that the federal government would have done something about this 20 years ago, when I (brought it up), we wouldn't have had this problem today,” Barletta said in a recent interview. “And you know, the problem has gotten so bad that I don't think there's going to be any way to completely fix the issue.”
Failures at immigration reform
His "shoulda-woulda-coulda" regrets might apply to three efforts at immigration reform that failed in Congress — June 2007, June 2013 and February 2024.
Each bill would have increased border agents and enhanced security measures at the southern border, including a wall or fencing, among many provisions. The 2007 and 2013 bills carried provisions to allow millions of immigrants already in the country illegally to remain and earn citizenship after years of steps. Barletta led the effort to kill the 2013 bill.
Trump, trying to win re-election, successfully urged the Senate to vote down the 2024 bill, forged in another bipartisan compromise.
Each time, House Republicans viewed any suggestion of a path to citizenship as “amnesty” and blocked the bills.
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, who voted for the 2013 bill, along with 67 other senators — Republicans and Democrats — said it contained plenty of money for a wall meant to attract Republican votes and would have required certification that the border was secure before allowing anyone to move toward citizenship.
"There doesn't seem to be any effort that's anywhere comparable to 2013," Casey said this week. "I mean, that's the ultimate answer, some version of 2013. It wasn't perfect, but it dealt with all the big issues ... If that bill were in place, this issue would not have dominated a couple of election cycles. The problem would be well on its way, a decade or more later, on its way to being solved."
Instead, last June, congressional Republicans pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which tackled a lot of issues, including immigration. The bill contained $170.7 billion that, in part, funds a massive increase in border and immigration agents, to build as many as 24 detention centers and implement other immigration control measures. Detention centers proposed for Schuylkill and Berks counties in Pennsylvania have stirred strong backlash.
“So that is by far the biggest change, because it's no longer a question of whether or not they have the resources to arrest people, detain them and to enforce immigration law,” Philadelphia immigration attorney Ricky Palladino said. “Because they now have the resources.”
Finding the millions
Numbers vary on how many immigrants are in the U.S. who shouldn’t be. Mehlman said his group calculates about 18.6 million. For many years, estimates ranged between 11 million and 13 million, depending on the source.
Trump’s solution to illegal immigrants already in the country: Arrest and detain them until you can deport them.
On its website, Trump’s White House boasts of deporting “more than 605,000 illegal aliens” since he took office, with an additional 1.9 million self-deporting.”
In early April, the Deportation Data Project, an independent group that tracks ICE activity, reported deportations five times higher in the Trump administration’s first year compared to President Joe Biden’s term.
ICE’s website carries almost daily news releases with headlines such as:
- “ICE Arrests Multiple Murderers, Rapists, and Pedophiles”
- “ICE Arrests Multiple Pedophiles, Kidnappers, and Violent Criminals”
- “ICE Arrests Murderers, Pedophiles, and Sexual Deviants”
Much of the federal data undermines the Trump administration argument on immigrants as criminals.
Data mining undermines administration's argument
As of April 4, ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol had 60,311 people detained in prisons nationwide, up from 39,703, the week before Biden left office, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration enforcement data.
The clearinghouse tracks immigration enforcement data through regular Freedom of Information Act requests.
In Pennsylvania prisons, ICE held 2,163 detainees on average daily as of April 2.
The most,1,650, were in the privately owned Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County.
The Pike County prison, which has held immigration detainees since the 1990s, had the second most, 237; followed by the Clinton County prison, 92; a federal detention center in Philadelphia, 83; the federal prison in Lewisburg, 62; and the Cambria County Prison, 39.
On Jan. 21, 2026, the day after Trump took office, only three Pennsylvania prisons had ICE detainees – Moshannon, 1,171; Pike, 181; and Clinton, 77.
More than 1,600 arrests in region
Arrest numbers by county are unavailable, but the deportation project, also through Freedom of Information Act requests, published a database of arrests by ICE officers.
From Jan. 1, 2025, to March 9, 2026, agents based in the Williamsport area office arrested 694 people — 375 with criminal convictions, 292 with pending criminal charges, 22 for immigration law violations and no descriptions for five.
During the same period, agents based in the Pike County office arrested 915 people – 248 convicted of crimes, 246 with pending criminal charges, 107 with immigration law violations and no descriptions for four.
TRAC reported fewer than 2% of new cases brought in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 were “based on any alleged criminal activity of the immigrant, apart from possible illegal entry.”
In addition, the clearinghouse published a database of pending immigration court cases by an immigrant’s address.
As of Feb. 26, 76,148 who live in Pennsylvania had pending immigration court cases, including 10,677 in WVIA’s 22-county coverage area in Northeast and Central Pennsylvania.
A few made news — the arrest of a restaurant owner and another man and his daughter in Lackawanna County; a pizzeria owner in Montour County; a social worker in Lycoming County.
'Living in fear'
TRAC reported fewer than 2% of new cases brought in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 were “based on any alleged criminal activity of the immigrant, apart from possible illegal entry.”
“My understanding is ... they're (ICE agents are) looking for someone who it seems like they've been monitoring for maybe a few days,” she said. “They kind of get to understand their (the immigrants’) morning routines, and then on their way to work, will detain them. And unfortunately, we have stories of there being collateral damage, where they're looking for someone, but if they're with other immigrants without lawful immigration status or with mixed immigration status, those individuals sometimes have been detained as well.”
Mixed immigration status refers to a mixed immigration status household with some members with legal status, some without legal status or some with applications for asylum or other legal status pending.
At least initially, some concerned about their immigration status enrolled their children in cyberschools and acted carefully when leaving their homes, though that subsided over time, she said.
“When I talk to people, they're like, ‘I still have to go to work, I still have to pay my mortgage, I still have to pay my rent, have to take my children to school,’” Gonzalez said. “So, 'Yes, I'm living in fear, but I have to be resilient for my loved ones.’”
'It's basically, they're targeting everyone'
Scranton immigration attorney Tracey Hubbard Rentas disdains the word “crackdown” to describe ICE's behavior.
“I mean, this is worse,” Hubbard Rentas said. “It's a nightmare because you don't know right now. It's basically, they're targeting everyone, and you don't know when it's going to be ... that they're going to just shut you out of the country.”
She and others who think the Trump administration’s crackdown is going too far still support the need to remove criminals.
“Nobody's going to argue that, right?” she said. “And I think we can all agree to that. I mean, we have enough of our own criminals. We don't need to, you know, import others. But that's not what's going on.”
This crackdown is “very arbitrary,” she said.
“It's a numbers game. It's not about the character of the person who is being detained,” Hubbard Rentas said. “It's about how many people are being detained.”
Changing the rules
Palladino, whose law firm just hired its 18th lawyer to handle immigration cases, said the Trump administration has transformed enforcement.
Generally, in the past, non-residents who entered the United States could stay using one of three basic methods, Palladino said.
One, they obtained a visa.
Two, they obtained permanent resident status, better known as a green card.
Three, they obtained political asylum, which means they fled their country because they feared violence.
Before Trump’s second term began, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did basic vetting and allowed people in each of the three groups to stay in the country, pending hearings and a decision on their case, Palladino said.
This generally required applicants to check in with ICE or USCIS.
“Trump 2.0 has taken the position that you don't get to stay here and that you don't have legal status, or to put more succinctly, you don't have protection from enforcement by virtue of having a pending application,” he said. “You only have protection from enforcement if you are actually granted the visa or the green card or political asylum. Now, that is a dramatic shift from the last 25 years that I've been involved in immigration.”
Now, when people whose immigration status remains pending check in with ICE or USCIS, they are routinely detained.
“The act of trying to become legalized is not enough for you to remain in the United States,” Palladino said. “This is a cataclysmic change from where things were previously ... Which means if they (detainees) have a way to become legalized, they essentially have to become legalized while detained.”
Some can afford lawyers, many can’t.
In the case of detainees already ordered deported, they are generally sent out of the country quickly. Virgilio Lema, of Scranton, a roofer who had been in the United States nine years, was sent back to Ecuador about a week after his November arrest, for example. He skipped an immigration check-in in September 2017 and eluded arrest the rest of his time here, but had no criminal history.
Others with no immediate deportation order face detention for many months until an immigration judge can rule.
That’s because the Trump administration also changed the rules on getting out of prison during an immigration case.
In a July 8, 2025, memo from Todd M. Lyons, then ICE’s acting director, not only wrote that any “alien” without a valid visa is subject to detention, he also said “these aliens are also ineligible” for a bond hearing before an immigration judge and “may not be released” while their status is determined.
Normally, someone arrested for a crime in the United States is entitled to reasonable bail with release often accomplished with a bail bond. The U.S. Constitution forbids excessive bail.
Not in immigration cases, Lyons’ memo says.
Challenging long detentions
Citing federal law and previous court rulings, lawyers for clients detained six months or longer nationwide have filed tens of thousands of writs of habeas corpus in federal court.
The writs demand officials bring a prisoner before a court to justify detention.
In the 33-county U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania alone, which covers northeast and central Pennsylvania, Palladino’s firm and other lawyers have filed writs to free more than 130 people since last fall.
The detainees are in the Moshannon, Pike, Clinton or Lewisburg prisons and came to the U.S. from all over the world. They include Belarus, Cambodia, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Georgia, Guatemala, Guinea, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
Like many others across the country, Pennsylvania’s middle district federal judges have begun to side with detainees, either ordering them released or ordering bond hearings.
The Department of Justice routinely appeals the rulings, which can mean a detainee is not immediately released.
Beyond the lack of bond hearings, the Trump administration has fired and replaced 113 immigration judges, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges. The administration replaced Board of Immigration Appeals members in an effort to quickly dispose of pending applications for admission.
Immigration lawyers complain vociferously.
“In my humble opinion, it's an abuse of procedure,” Hubbard Rentas said.
“It's abuse of power. It's so much pressure that's coming down on ... the Board of Immigration Appeals judges ... the ICE trial attorneys who are representing the government in these cases," she said. "We are fighting just an ever-shifting landscape, and ... any ruling that can come down to hurt an immigrant is what's happening. It's like due process doesn't matter anymore.”
'The border can be controlled'
Mehlman, the pro-enforcement advocate, sees an immigration system that’s finally working.
As he and Republicans like to point out, the number of people attempting to enter the United States without authorization shot up dramatically under President Joe Biden.
From more than 400,000 border encounters with immigrants at the border with Mexico in the last full fiscal year in Trump’s first term, encounters peaked at more than 2.2 million under Biden in fiscal year 2022. They declined to more than 1.5 million by his final year in office, but Biden’s successor slashed that even more dramatically.
Encounters mean ICE agents interact with border-crossing immigrants, but do not necessarily mean all the immigrants successfully entered the country.
In fiscal year 2025, which included Trump’s roughly first 8½ months in office, the number declined to 237,538. That’s the fewest in more than 50 years, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the federal statistics.
“First of all, they demonstrated that the border can be controlled,” Mehlman said.
For years, Mehlman said, critics of tough enforcement argued “that we can't enforce the border.”
“And, you know, within six weeks of taking office, you know, he (Trump) proved them wrong, including the first Trump administration, (when) we did see significant illegal immigration border crossings,” Mehlman said.
He dismisses arguments favoring a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who haven’t caused trouble here. In 1986, the last time Congress passed an immigration reform bill, about 2.7 million undocumented received amnesty and were allowed to remain, he points out.
He remembers promises of enforcement to prevent a recurrence. Instead, millions kept coming uninvited and nothing happened, he said.
“The American public was promised ... that we would secure the border. They were promised that we were going to prevent employers from hiring more illegal aliens in,” Mehlman said. “And you know, the only promise that was kept was kept to the people who violated the laws. They got their amnesty. Everybody else got a bunch of empty promises.”
Which is why subsequent congressional efforts at reform failed, he said.
Mehlman dismissed claims of racism by ICE because detainees come from a wide variety of countries. He compared immigration enforcement to local law enforcement.
“The local police obviously prioritize going after violent criminals,” he said. “But you know, if they happen to catch you shoplifting, it doesn't mean that they're simply going to say go on your way.”
All the Trump administration’s strategies have worked because they create deterrence, he said.
“Illegal aliens make rational decisions. They’ve been coming in large numbers because they believed that the laws of this country would not be enforced,” Mehlman said. “People have gotten the message ... Why would you pay these criminal cartels tens of thousands of dollars that you don't have in order to try to get you into the country when there's a pretty certain chance, you're not going to make it in?”
Debating ICE tactics
Crackdown opponents inferred another message rooted in out-of-control ICE agents shooting dead two protesting American citizens in Minnesota, leading another almost naked from his home and arresting many non-criminals. Questions remain about the investigations into those and other incidents during “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota.
As the Lackawanna County commissioners debated the employee/ICE cooperation restrictions, one woman who spoke at their March 4 meeting likened ICE in Minnesota to Nazi Germany.
“If that doesn't say inhumanity to man, I don't know what it is, but the current situation looks like the beginning of the inhumanity to man again,” Judy Quinlan said.
In an interview, Scott Twp. Supervisor Michael Giannetta, who publicly opposed the county policy on ICE interactions, said he’s all for controlling “the excesses of ICE.”
“And you know, that's not to say all ICE is like that. But some are like that, and some police officers are like that,” Giannetta said. “But we have a judicial system that addresses an out-of-control police officer or an out-of-control ICE law enforcement officer too. So, you can't paint them all with a bad brush.”
Giannetta thinks immigration keyed Trump’s re-election.
He frequently reminds people Trump won, despite recent polls showing Americans dislike the way ICE has gone about enforcement.
“There were 77 million people that voted to close the border, finish the wall and deport the illegal aliens,” he said.
Allowing people already in the country illegally to gain citizenship shouldn’t happen, he said.
“If some kind of a deal was worked out where some could stay and have some type of a legal status, that would probably be okay,” Giannetta said. “But just to give them citizenship, it rewards just coming into the country illegally while other people did it legally, and it cost them money, and it took them a lot of time to do it, and it's not fair.”
'They’re humans, you know?'
The enforcement crackdown may be satisfying to the Trump administration and its supporters, but its critics see mostly inhumanity because so many detainees have no criminal history. In their eyes, the crackdown only unnecessarily tears apart families who live productive lives and contribute to society.
“The influence of immigrants is so beneficial to the average American that it's almost astounding when you look at it purely based on numbers,” Palladino said.
Unfortunately, many people who accept Trump’s criminality argument focus on outliers, he said.
“That's how Trump's able to do what he's doing without a large pushback, is he defines everyone by these outliers, right?” Palladino said. “And the real problem is that, politically, the people that should be defining are the non-outliers — the really good people that are working, that are keeping our restaurants open, that are, cultivating our crops, driving our trucks, all of that. They're not speaking out because they're scared.”
Gonzalez sees “more than just the economic piece.”
'They’re humans, you know? And like most people, will cross oceans to give their children a better life,” she said. “But people, for the most part, come here and they don't want to be undocumented. Nobody wants to live in the shadows for decades and decades. They come here, they're working, they're raising children, they're buying houses, they're opening businesses, and this is both undocumented and people with mixed immigration statuses.' — Jenny Gonzalez, an immigrant advocate
“They’re humans, you know? And like most people, will cross oceans to give their children a better life,” she said. “But people, for the most part, come here and they don't want to be undocumented. Nobody wants to live in the shadows for decades and decades. They come here, they're working, they're raising children, they're buying houses, they're opening businesses, and this is both undocumented and people with mixed immigration statuses.”
For decades, she points out, the populations of Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton declined.
“If it weren't for these immigrants and for a lot of the communities of color moving to this region, these towns and cities would be in more of a challenging situation, economically, socially, culturally,” Gonzalez said. “A lot of these individuals that are moving to this region are immigrants and refugees ... they're just making our communities significantly vibrant. And I just don't understand the rhetoric that like all of these individuals are bad people because they lack immigration status.”
