No, Bucks County has NOT outlawed ICE

When an honest adult makes a mistake, he or she corrects it.

Even if it’s half a mistake, which I was guilty of Jan. 15 in a column that was headlined, “New Bucks sheriff reverses cooperation with ICE.” 

My column was based on reporting from NBC News, the Inquirer, and various broadcasts.

After it ran, the new sheriff, Democrat Danny Ceisler, reached out to talk to me, feeling I got some things wrong.

I had.

We sat down Friday morning and the 33-year-old Army officer-turned-lawyer and I had a 38-minute conversation. We agreed on a lot, and disagreed, too. There is nothing wrong with principled differences of opinion.

Let’s start with the headline.

It was overly broad. Ceisler did end one agreement, called a 287(g), that authorized 16 deputies (out of 100 staffers) to work with ICE as enforcement agents.

That agreement was announced last April by Ceisler’s predecessor, Republican Fred Harran, who cited public safety concerns. Candidate Ceisler opposed the deal citing, yes, public safety concerns.

Principled differences.

Interestingly, the partnership with ICE was never in effect.

After Harran announced it, the ACLU pounced on it. The ACLU lost in court, but Harran lost the election to Ceisler. Bye-bye 287(g).

The important thing, Ceisler stressed, is that all other cooperation with ICE continued, as it had in the past. Which means I was wrong when I described Bucks as an Open Borders county.

Bucks County Deputy Director of Communications, Jim O’Malley, told me the same thing. 

Bucks County never was, and never will be under him, a Sanctuary County, Ceisler said firmly.

He told me that his office will continue to share information with all law-enforcement agencies, and that ICE has access to the Bucks County jail.

“Every single person who is arrested and comes through our correctional facility,” Ceisler said, “gets fingerprinted. Their biometric information is sent through a system called Live Scan to hundreds of agencies and jurisdictions around the country. ICE is one of them.” 

O’Malley confirmed that and shared a Department of Corrections policy requiring DOC to provide ICE with 24/7 access to the jail and inmate population, allowing ICE access to criminal justice information, and notifying ICE of the pending release of an inmate in which ICE has expressed interest. 

(In contrast, Sanctuary City Philadelphia does not share any information with ICE, nor does it allow access to jails, nor cooperate with the agency in any way. It actually releases convicted foreign felons, as I have reported in the past.)

When ending the 287(g) program, Ceisler talked about the costs, but it turns out those were not financial.

He was talking about the “costs” in public trust. “I mean the difficulty that we had in getting people to come to the courthouse [to testify] or to call 911,” he said. Even though those 16 deputies had never detained anyone.

Even people here legally were afraid, he said.

I hear that a lot and asked him why legal residents would be fearful of coming forward.

We live in a “complex information environment,” said Ceisler, with people getting “information from all sorts of sources. They’re seeing what’s going on around the country and they’re terrified.”

What they now are seeing mostly

are battles in Sanctuary Cities where ICE agents have to go into communities to extract illegals, with no help from local police.

Ceisler agrees that ICE is an actual law-enforcement agency — and he publicly berated Philadelphia’s dipsy-doodle Sheriff Rochelle Bilal who called ICE officers “fake.” He also agrees that immigration law is legitimate, and that ICE’s role is to enforce the law.

Tactics are another matter. That is what has turned a majority of Americans against ICE, from what had been majority approval before the heavy-handed raids, not to mention the deaths of two people.

I see over and over in the MainStream Media that “immigrant communities” are “terrorized” by ICE enforcement. But if you are a citizen, or a legal immigrant, you are in no danger from the feds. (Please don’t cite the one case in 25,000 where a citizen is mistakenly detained. Yes, mistakes happen.)

The few mistakes are picked up by the media and magnified and presented as normal, which they are not. ICE arrests about 1,000 people a day, most of whom had no serious criminal conviction. You don’t hear about the 996 arrests that were executed without problem; while the 4 mistakes are blared across the country.

“Fear” is fanned by a media not distinguishing between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. They are all lumped together as “migrants,” thanks to the AP deciding more than a decade ago that “illegal immigrant,” a long-standing and honest description, somehow had become “dehumanizing,” a term to be avoided.

When legal and illegal become synonymous in that “complex information environment” that Ceisler mentioned, the confusion and fear is not hard to understand. 

So if legal immigrant communities feel “terrorized,” I lay it at the feet of a MainStream Media that chooses woke obfuscation over plain straight talk.

Ceisler did not want to get into that, and I don’t blame him. He said that is not in his lane.

But . . . He’s kind of does the same thing. 

In his speech announcing the change, Ceisler said “Bucks County is home to over 50,000 immigrants . . . They are our neighbors, our friends, they are taxpayers — and they deserve the protection of law enforcement in our community.”

Who is he talking about?

Legal immigrants require no more “protection” than anyone else. His statement sort-of suggests the 50,000 are undocumented.

I asked Ceisler how many illegals reside in Bucks.

He said he doesn’t know.

And, really, he doesn’t want to know. 

AI sources estimate the number of illegal immigrants from a low of 9,000 (ChatGPT) to a high of 18,000 (Gemini). 

I asked ICE for estimates, and for comments, but my calls were not returned.

Ceisler didn’t say he didn’t want to know, so am I a mind-reader?

No. I draw my conclusion from Ceisler’s stated desire to see the illegals who have lived productive and peaceful lives be offered a path to citizenship. 

I don’t, because that rewards illegal behavior with the gift of American citizenship. But I don’t agree with mass deportation. 

In past columns I have advocated for a statute of limitations on illegal entry. This one is from 2019. People who have lived here for five years or more without incident should be offered a path to legal residence, not citizenship.

Principled differences.

Ceisler said enforcing immigration law is not included in the sheriff’s mission, which includes securing the courthouse, transporting prisoners, hunting fugitives, and executing judicial orders, such as bench warrants and protection from abuse orders (Pennsylvania’s version of restraining orders).

His approach to his job, he said, is the mission-oriented method he learned in the Army, where he served as a military intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2016. 

Chasing immigrants is not what the Bucks County sheriff is supposed to do, he said.

But cooperating with ICE is, and he does.