about the language of a companion bill that would prohibit county employees from cooperating with ICE agents while at work under threat of possibly losing their jobs,<\/a> a vote on that policy was postponed.<\/p>\nThe new policy stops ICE from using all county-owned property, including buildings, parking lots, garages, open space, parks and undeveloped land for staging, processing or making an operations base for any part of an immigration operation.<\/p>\n
It does not apply to areas controlled by the judicial branch, such as courthouses, or to the county jail.<\/p>\n
Sheila Alvarado, Zach Cole-Borghi, Sarah Fevig, Jon Irons, April Riddick and Geoff Brace voted in favor of the policy. Dan Hartzell and Antonio Pineda voted against. Ron W. Beitler was absent.<\/p>\n
The noncooperation policy will be back on the agenda July 8. The legislation proposed by Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel would prevent county employees from giving nonpublic or personally identifiable information about any person to federal immigration agencies or officers unless they\u2019re under a subpoena, court order or warrant, or the disclosure was reviewed and approved by the county solicitor.<\/p>\n
While several members of the board spoke in favor the proposed policy, others said they worried about its effect on county workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt comes down to the people who do the work,\u201d Alvarado said.<\/p>\n
Fevig, who made the motion to postpone Wednesday night\u2019s vote on the policy, spoke about an email the board received from an employee who was confused about what would be expected of workers if the bill passed and wondered what training would be involved. Fevig said employee responsibilities under the proposed rule need to be better defined, and training in place before it is implemented.<\/p>\n
Irons said he will vote for the noncooperation policy when it comes back before the board.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis policy addresses the reality that we face in the United States right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lehigh County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday voted to ban U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,2376,202,182,883,139,50,432],"class_list":["post-229011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-local-news","tag-local-politics","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}