Following in the footsteps of Allegheny County and other municipalities around the region and the country, a group of Pittsburgh city councilors want to limit the city’s interaction with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
Councilors introduced a package of several bills on Tuesday aimed at formalizing current policies that limit the city’s role in ICE activity, and that tighten those limits further. The bills would also gather information about local use of surveillance technology.
The legislation would ban city employees or contractors from asking someone about their immigration status. They’d also codify into law the policies that police already follow: The legislation would disallow investigations or other law-enforcement action solely based on citizenship or immigration status, prohibit city employees and agencies from allowing ICE access to a person in custody, and forbid the city from entering into a formal partnership with ICE.
“ Mayor O’Connor has been abundantly clear that we are not cooperating with ICE here at the city of Pittsburgh,” City Councilor Barb Warwick, one of the bills’ sponsors, told WESA. Police Chief Jason Lando, she added, “has also been clear about that as far as the Bureau of Police is concerned, and it’s time for City Council to codify that, put it into law.”
“We are writing it down and making it official,” she said.
The bills would also curtail ICE activity on city property. They would designate some city-owned or -operated properties — like parks, community centers, libraries, court facilities, libraries, and homeless shelters — as places where ICE cannot access non-public areas without a judicial warrant. They would require city contractors, and those leasing city property, to forbid ICE from staging themselves on city land.
President Donald Trump announced yesterday that ICE agents would be deployed at airports to help federal Transportation Security Administration staff move travelers through security lines.
Councilor Erika Strassburger, another co-sponsor of the legislation, said the goal was to establish rules for “everything from the property that we own, the buildings that we own, the services that we offer to individuals, the contractors who might bid on contracts or opportunities with the city.”
“Whatever is within our control, we want to ensure that people can get to school, get to work, get to doctor’s appointments, their places of worship and travel freely in the city, without fear that they’re going to be disappeared,” she said.
Additionally, one of the bills asks city officials to put together a report on surveillance technologies. Councilor Deb Gross, who has long expressed privacy concerns about the use of such equipment, says more scrutiny and protection is needed as the technology advances.
“ There’s now technology that is for sale that can track where you are, what you’re doing, and it’s in the marketplace,” she said. “We want to make sure that any of the many, many technologies we’re using here isn’t selling out your data to someone who could be buying it to follow you personally.”
Warwick says the bills were modeled after legislation passed in Philadelphia. Gross said the city councilors consulted with local immigrant advocacy groups.
‘I don’t know exactly where we’re going to draw that line’
The bills clarify that city officials or employees will be able to assist federal agents if there are “threats to public safety, even when caused by immigration enforcement officials or by an immigration enforcement operation.”
But there are different perspectives on when police should get involved.
A statement announcing the introduction of the bills says one motivation for them was video footage posted online of an ICE arrest in Mt. Washington in December, in which city police assisted. The footage, which is drawn from police body cameras, shows some police ridiculing protesters and helping federal agents with mundane tasks, though not directly participating in arrests.
Conversely, there has been controversy over a recent incident outside the Zone 3 headquarters, where police stood by as an ICE agent struggled to take a man into custody. Critics of the city’s policy say that kind of hands-off approach can put police and the public in danger.
Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1 President Bob Swartzwelder said police must be ready to help, in case an ICE arrest can escalate into a more dangerous situation.
“ We’re peace officers. Let’s stabilize the situation, get it under control, dust everybody off, somebody needs medical attention or whatever, and then let Immigration and Customs Enforcement go and do what they do,” he said. “ To say that we’re gonna stand around and we’re gonna allow them to potentially be assaulted or injured or disarmed is foolish. That is not what law enforcement is about.”
Gross said the debate over immigration enforcement, and the role local police should play in it, was polarized.
“ We have citizens who are upset because they’ve seen our city police, what they believe they’ve seen is collaboration,” she said. “We also have concerns from other citizens that they have seen a lack of collaboration when there’s someone in distress. … So I don’t know that we know right now exactly where we’re going to draw that line.”
The goal of the ordinance was to establish “that there isn’t a prearranged relationship,” she said. “But when it comes down to who’s in distress and where our officers should step in, I think that’s really still debated.”
David Harris, a criminal law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, agrees that such emergency situations can be tricky for police — in part because of what he calls “over-the-top tactics used by ICE agents that you would not see in a well-trained police department.”
“These situations, as we have seen in so many videos, are often chaotic,” he said. “So if the local police are called — there’s disorder, there’s an emergency, something like that — by the time they get there, it could be all different. This is one of the worst possible kinds of situations for police to be called into if they don’t have and don’t want the frontline responsibility of executing the policy of ICE.”
He noted that police departments that are collaborating with ICE — or that are perceived as doing so — risk damaging their reputation and communication with the community.
“Being seen as part of the effort ICE is making here, in these extreme ways, damages that relationship that police must have with all members of the community,” he said. “If people become afraid of the local police, that cuts off communication and trust.“
But if they don’t help in an emergency, he said, they risk being sued, or having someone end up hurt.
“ It just puts them in a really difficult place,” Harris said.
Sara Rose, deputy legal director with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, says the top priority in these situations is public safety. But she added that if police have promised not to work with ICE, they should not be helping out with solely immigration-related arrests.
“ There’s a difference between assisting in immigration enforcement versus assisting in public safety,” she said. “ If the only reason for the arrest is immigration status, then I would not expect the local police to assist.”
In a statement, the city’s Republican Committee questioned whether the package of bills put forward Tuesday was constitutional, and said council’s rules could interfere with “lawful enforcement actions.”
“This is a dangerous precedent,” city Republican chairman Todd McCollum said. “You cannot selectively cooperate with federal authorities when it’s convenient and block them when it’s politically expedient. Public safety doesn’t work that way.”
Council is set to revisit the package of ICE regulation bills for discussion next week.