In Pa. coal country, local police join with ICE to bring arrests, fear

SCHUYLKILL HAVEN, Pa. — Brett Sell had a bad feeling about coming to work on July 28. The painting contractor was part of a small work crew rehabbing a two-store commercial property in Orwigsburg — a borough of just over 3,000 people in the heart of east-central Pennsylvania’s coal country — and workers had seen what looked like an unmarked law-enforcement vehicle circling the site the day before.

“Yo, look up!” Sell said to his fellow painter, Orlando Rivera.

Police cars from Orwigsburg and neighboring Schuylkill Haven, lights flashing, blocked off the street while agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tactical vests swarmed the work site. Sell was stunned as he and four other workers were quickly handcuffed by ICE agents — even though Sell and Rivera are native-born U.S. citizens.

Rivera, a biracial Puerto Rican who grew up in Bethlehem and now lives in another Schuylkill County borough, Tamaqua, said he was “embarrassed” as he stood in handcuffs while locals came out into the street to gawk. “I do a lot of work in that town,” he said, adding that, ”it made me feel like I was portrayed as a criminal."

And he’s convinced he was handcuffed — even after offering to show the agents his ID — because of his race. “I get that my skin tone is tan,” he said, “but with the Fourth Amendment they can’t go off my skin color, you know?”

Two workers were detained. One was later released but the other — Catarino Hernandez Velasquez — a Mexican native who’s lived in Pottsville for at least 14 years, and a well-known contractor who poured concrete for the just-reopened 1928 Miners Hotel — was taken away and sent to ICE’s Moshannon Valley Detention Center in central Pennsylvania, known for its overcrowding and complaints about lousy food and medical neglect. Kevin Medina, a leader of the local Latino community, bemoaned the arrest of a “very hard-working gentleman with a stable contracting business in the area...very busy.”

Now, gone...in a matter of minutes.

The Orwigsburg raid was a dramatic moment, yet such scenes are becoming increasingly common this summer in Schuylkill County, Pa., a constellation of rusty boroughs where coal was king in the 20th century and Donald Trump got 71% of the vote in 2024.

Since the start of the year, ICE — flush with a whopping windfall of $170 billion shoveled by Congress to the Department of Homeland Security to amp up immigration raids and detention — has dangled pledges to many tiny police departments. In Schuylkill County, which locals call “the Skook,” has received over $1.5 million. The police chief and pols all but publicly salivated at the chance — under the controversial program known as 287(g) — to buy a desperately needed new cruiser or other cop tools in return for working with ICE to arrest and hold local immigrants for the feds.

Some 14 law-enforcement agencies — the most of any of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties — have inked 287(g) pacts with ICE, launching a new era of beat cops making immigration arrests that has roiled daily life in Schuylkill County. Practically overnight, cops were setting up truck inspections on a busy rural bypass or running checkpoints at places like The Freeze, a popular ice-cream joint on the main drag, State Route 61. Officers were pouncing on immigrants who showed up at the county courthouse in Pottsville, or assisting ICE on workplace raids like the one in Orwigsburg.

Arrests leading to ICE detention and deportation cases skyrocketed across Schuylkill County — more than 100 since the start of the year, with most the result of ICE cooperation under 287(g) — leaving families torn apart while creating a climate of fear among what had been a rapidly growing Latino community in and around Pottsville. Suddenly, essential workers or their loved ones grew terrified that a busted taillight or failing to signal while shifting lanes could turn their world upside down.

One borough with just over 5,000 residents — Schuylkill Haven – has seen at least 59 immigration arrests in about four months, a staggering number. The figures come from Chicago-based ICE watcher Andrew Thrasher, a law-firm staffer and data expert who regularly crunches federal statistics obtained by the Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests.

“People are afraid to go out,” Medina — who immigrated to Schuylkill County from Honduras, became a U.S. citizen, a notary and insurance agent, and formed a local Latino support group, Puentes de Apoyo — told me when we met in a Hispanic-owned Pottsville pizza joint. “I’ve got one contractor who told me they’ve got to change routes because now they know that in Schuylkill Haven, even they can’t go over there. And the stress, mentally, that I’m seeing in these families of, ‘What am I going to do if this happens?’”

The wave of arrests have put Schuylkill County — mostly rural, mostly conservative, and far removed from the glare of media or the kind of organized ICE resistance you see in big cities — on the cutting edge of an aggressive new strategy for mass deportation. This approach is bringing a xenophobic Donald Trump regime closer to fulfilling its once-unthinkable goal of removing 1 million immigrants from the United States every year.

The tag team of local cops and tactical-gear wearing ICE agents is the biggest reason why federal immigration arrests spiked in July to a Trump-era high of 49,571, or about 1,600 every day. Statisticians who are tracking mass deportation said that 287(g) arrests — named for the section of a 1996 law that authorized the program — involving local police went from less than 3% of the total under Joe Biden to about 15% now, and will only climb higher as hundreds of new departments sign up.

This year about 58% of the people nabbed by cops and turned over to ICE under 287(g) have no criminal record or pending charges, a higher rate than the typical ICE arrestee. Thrasher found the number for Pennsylvania is even higher, about 70%.

While not as active as in big and heavily conservative states like Texas and Florida, the Keystone State’s 1,216 arrests under the 287(g) program in the first seven months of 2026 rank the commonwealth fourth in the nation — on a Top 15 list made up of states almost exclusively south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Pennsylvania’s outlier status is punctuated by the fact that two large bordering states — New York and Maryland — have moved, with some bumps, to ban their police agencies from signing 287(g) agreements. Almost all of the Pennsylvania arrests came from smaller cities, exurbs or rural areas — especially the south-central and northeastern regions of the state, and a smattering of western localities — that voted heavily for Trump and his anti-immigrant message.

The small-town nature of this renewed push for mass deportation is a defining feature of the Trump regime strategy, and not a bug. The race among Schuylkill County’s police departments — many with just three or four cops, including the chief — to sign up for 287(g) and its pumped-up pile of cash came exactly as the two Minneapolis murders of U.S. citizens by immigration cops were fueling growing public outrage.

As a brutal ICE winter ended, the Trump regime ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the notorious field general Greg Bovino and ended an era of loud, publicity-seeking operations with catchy names in large blue cities that stirred up local protesters who blew whistles and filmed every move by the masked, armed agents.

Under new DHS boss Markwayne Mullin, ICE and its allies are focused on what you might call small-batch immigration busts — in courthouses or on airport security lines, and, thanks to 287(g), at local traffic stops or truck inspections. No one is blowing whistles, and few of these busts get caught on video. Yet even here in blood-red Trump Country, some locals are troubled by the intense police focus on immigrants and what it’s doing to the moral fabric of their community.

“No one’s telling you not to arrest people — I’m telling you not to hunt for them, to do stops on the side of the road and arrest them like the Gestapo,” a Democratic city council member in Pottsville, Andy Wollyung, told me after he tried and failed to stop the county seat from joining 287(g). He later fretted that immigration arrests “will drive a wedge in people, you know? These aren’t unknown people. These are our neighbors.”

“When local police officers serve as a force multiplier for ICE, we know that people become more afraid to report crime,” Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told me. “They become less willing to cooperate with local law enforcement when it comes to investigations, including things like homicides. And there’s an overall mistrust of public institutions.”

The irony is that today’s Schuylkill County was built on the backs of immigrants — initially a wave of Irish who dug the 19th century coal mines and were also persecuted, including six members of the infamous Molly Maguires who were hanged in Pottsville in 1877. They were followed by Eastern Europeans who filled the local mining towns like Mahanoy City and Shenandoah.

Those who stayed behind after the mines started closing in the 1950s and kept its hillside towns of striking Victorian architecture and utilitarian rowhouses alive got a booster shot in the 21st century with an unexpected new wave: Latinos. Many landed in Schuylkill County when seeking a place with cheaper housing and more job opportunities for hard workers than big cities like New York or Philadelphia.

Four years ago, Pastor Luis Rivera and his wife bought an historic local church building in Pottsville and rechristened it as Iglesia Cristiana El Kairos, under the umbrella of the Evangelical New Life Church, to serve a Latino community now growing by leaps and bounds.

“You see a lot of traffic,” the pastor told me. “You see people remodeling more houses. And a lot of the stores are opening around here...It was really dead before, you know?” Today, it’s estimated that about 1,000 of Pottsville’s 14,000 residents are Latino.

Six of the more recent arrivals were Venezuelan-born Carlos Moreno, his wife Wendy Martínez, and their blended family of four teenagers. They’d been on the run from government persecution and armed conflict across South America when they came to America in 2023 and stayed in a cramped public shelter in New York City as the family sought asylum and obtained work permits.

When they moved to a narrow rowhouse on a rugged patch of Norwegian Street on the steep hillside up from downtown Pottsville, the couple found jobs at the county’s large Amazon warehouse and even started a small cleaning business, even though Moreno, 37, is legally blind and has severe hearing problems.

“For the first time in years, it felt like our lives were finally becoming stable,” Martínez would later write. “Then, in the fall of 2025, we learned that I was pregnant. It was an unexpected surprise, but a very welcome one.”

A bigger and less welcome surprise awaited. This spring, a neighbor called police to complain about noise — music from a small boombox — and Moreno received a summons. He decided to challenge it at the Schuylkill County Courthouse a few blocks away, and when he lost, he paid a fine, walked out of the courtroom — and right into ICE agents waiting to arrest him. He was sent to detention in the Cambria County Jail and stayed there as massive earthquakes halted deportations to Venezuela. He was locked up when his son Noah was born — on the Fourth of July.

Martínez was alternately rocking and bouncing her then-six-week-old son when I joined Medina in visiting their cluttered, narrow rowhouse in August. The windows were covered with thick blankets that let in only a sliver of light, and Martínez was bookended on a sofa by her two daughters, on their phones, who rarely leave home.

“They told him that he was a dangerous person,” Martínez said in Spanish, interpreted by Medina, as her baby babbled. “There hasn’t been any situation where he was against the law, or anything.” Struggling to pay her bills and support the five children, Martínez launched a GoFundMe page but has only raised $2,695 of her $4,000 goal. Her husband was recently moved to ICE detention in Louisiana.

Like most immigration arrests since 287(g) swept across Schuylkill County, there is an element of mystery about what exactly happened to Moreno. I twice called the Schuylkill County sheriff, Shawn Butler, to ask if his department — the first county agency to join 287(g), back in January — was involved, but he did not get back to me. Not once in a month of reporting did a police chief or municipal official return a call or email from this out-of-town columnist. Secrecy, and a lack of accountability, seems to be baked into the 287(g) program.

“Any right-to-know requests, any FOIA requests, anything — you defer that right down to the Department of Homeland Security,” Jody Long, the then-police chief in Mahanoy Township, told the Pottsville city council when it was voting on a 287(g) agreement in May. “You don’t answer anything with that. That’s right from their legal team.”

In early September, I attended the bimonthly meeting of the Schuylkill Haven borough council hoping to ask police chief Jeffrey Walcott, mayor John Williams, or other officials how and why their small borough just south of Pottsville had managed to make at least 59 immigration arrests since signing a 287(g) pact with ICE on April 5. I didn’t get very far.

In a brief conversation, Walcott suggested, interestingly, that commenting on 287(g) might bring protesters to Schuylkill Haven. When I asked Williams about the program after the meeting, the police chief interrupted our conversation to say there should be “a unified response,” and then later told me any information would need to come from Homeland Security or a freedom-of-information request.

Most of what citizens and the media in Schuylkill County know about the 287(g) programs come from borough or township council meetings where a police chief tells elected officials about all the sweeteners that cash-flush ICE added to the program when Congress and Trump enacted the so-called Big Beautiful Bill in 2025.

Police departments or county sheriffs who join the most common 287(g) Task Force model get $100,000 for vehicles or other equipment and $7,500 for each officer who undergoes 40 hours of mostly online training, as well as additional dollars for their time on immigration matters — all contingent on making actual arrests. In August, Schuylkill Haven officials said they’re expecting a federal check for $152,000 — money the borough wants to spend on buying the currently leased police headquarters.

The cash incentives have sparked a kind of deportation arms race across Pennsylvania, which has gone from just a few 287(g) programs at the start of the year to more than 130, with new ones coming online every day. Most of the council debates tread lightly on the question of liability for an officer who makes a bad arrest — a problem ICE is belatedly looking to fix with a proposal to insure each officer up to $500,000 — or the elevated risk that a traffic stop could lead to violence.

That’s already happened. On May 20, a Schuylkill Haven cop stopped a car on State Route 61 after he claimed the driver had illegally dark-tinted windows. ICE agents who were in the borough and arrived at the stop ran the license of 34-year-old Yensy Rafael Santana Alvarez of New York City and determined he had an immigration removal order.

According to the Skook News, a court affidavit said the man handed over his car keys and stepped out of his car — then ran for it. Alvarez led the law officers on a wild foot chase across the Schuylkill River and back, getting tased once and allegedly pulling one officer under water as another suffered minor injuries. He was eventually arrested and felony charges were filed but then dropped.

Some local critics also questioned whether minimally trained cops making immigration arrests is a good idea in a county where some departments have a history of police abuses. “In northern Schuylkill County, over the last 10 years, we’ve had horrendous police...acting very unprofessional in different departments,” John Hampton, a lawyer who has worked with Mahanoy Township, told me.

In 2022, two then-police officers in the borough of Minersville were indicted on still-pending federal police brutality charges for allegedly severely beating a man during a traffic stop and falsifying police reports to cover it up. That didn’t prevent ICE from signing a 287(g) agreement with Minersville police in May.

That same month, local activists pleaded with the Pottsville city council during a meeting that lasted more than five hours not to join the 287(g) program, arguing that immigration arrests would make tourists and new businesses not want to come there. They thought they’d won in a 3-2 vote, only to have GOP council member Scott Price change his position and demand a revote that flipped the outcome, saying that, in the end, “I have to side with our police officers.”

» READ MORE: This quaint Pa. borough is a ‘speed trap’ nabbing immigrants for ICE | Will Bunch

One of the few pro-287(g) advocates who spoke at that May hearing was Mahanoy Township’s Long, who said his department had been “the leader in the county” by making 10 immigration arrests, mainly at what he called a truck-safety inspection point. “ICE does not come in and tell you what to do,” Long insisted. “We tell them what to do.”

He was joined by one of his officers, Anthony Maldonado, who cited his own heritage as a Puerto Rican to insist there is no racial profiling. “I have family members who are light-skinned, dark-skinned, everywhere in between, so I would take it very personally if we conducted ourself unprofessionally to that effect,” he said.

The room in Pottsville did not hear from Moe Montalvo, a gutter contractor from nearby Tamaqua who in mid-April passed through the checkpoint on Burma Road operated by cops from Mahanoy Township and assisted by adjacent Ryan Township officers. He said he was part of a two-truck convoy and the first one with two white occupants was waved through, while his was stopped to allow the officers to ask Montalvo, a 28-year-old U.S. citizen who is half Puerto Rican and half Egyptian, for his ID and grill him about his identity.

Montalvo posted that day on Facebook that when he told an officer he was born in Montgomery County, Pa., the cop replied: “Are you sure? Because you look like a Mexican.” Montalvo also quoted the officer: “Why are you worried? The only thing you should be worried about is when I take my Taser out, because I’m going to aim right for your nose piercing.” I confirmed the incident with Montalvo, who told me “it seems like there was no doubt that racial profiling was involved here.”

Weeks later, the Mahanoy Township police department went dark, at least temporarily, after Long, Maldonado, and its other officer all quit in a disagreement with supervisors. One of the supervisors, Republican Tony Merchlinsky, confirmed to me the entire force had resigned after a dispute with supervisors over its refusal to wear body cameras. He said it was triggered by a civilian complaint over an arrest that did not involve immigration, although he added “it may have involved racial profiling.”

Maldonado took to Facebook to give his side of the story, that a different supervisor had told the township officers they were making too many arrests, and that, as quoted by Maldonado, he preferred “a [B]arney Fife department and have his police drive around and wave at people instead of making arrests.” Merchlinsky confirmed that Mahanoy Township — which recently hired a new, albeit part-time, police chief — has yet to see one dime from the feds of the more than $100,000 that was promised.

The checkpoint drama and police tensions in Mahanoy Township demonstrate some of the many problems when beat cops are drafted to join Trump’s mass-deportation crusade. Are police really making their towns safer when one part of the community is taking long traffic detours and covering up their windows in terror of any contact with cops? Is the economic gloom over Pennsylvania’s fading coal country really going to be lifted by clamping down on immigrants who’d been flocking there to pour concrete and rehab old buildings?

Does a region whose very DNA is handed down by the immigrants who once came here to shovel anthracite now want to be known in the 21st century as a “show me your papers” police state?

Few of these questions are being asked as one former coal burg after another races to embrace a Trumpian bargain with the 287(g) program. The latest is Mahanoy Township’s next-door neighbor Ryan Township, which in June voted conditionally to join the ICE mass-deportation program, citing as the biggest incentive its need to replace its run-down Ford Explorer, one of the oldest police cars in Schuylkill County.

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