The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer have always been concerned with legality, at least as far as it concerns Donald Trump. They were late to the table to ‘question’ whether the city’s George Soros-sponsored, criminal-loving and police-hating District Attorney, Larry Krasner, should remain in office due to his legal problems. But now it seems that they support law-breakers:

Pennsylvania’s shameful contribution to President Trump’s immigration crackdown | Editorial

Gov. Shapiro should seize the opportunity to counter a cruel attack on the state’s communities.

by The Editorial Board | Tuesday, September 22, 2026 | 8:30 AM EDT

A disturbing innovation of President Donald Trump’s deportation dragnet has replaced confrontational invasions of big cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles with a quieter and, unfortunately, more effective crackdown in the nation’s least visible corners.

Pennsylvania’s coal country is among the unlikely targets of this latest wave of mass detentions, facilitated by the small-town police departments that are supposed to be keeping the region safe.

Too many law enforcement agencies in Schuylkill County are doing much the opposite, instead creating a climate of fear with apparently race-based immigration raids and checkpoints. As The Inquirer’s Will Bunch reported, a mountain of federal money has enticed the region’s police departments to serve as foot soldiers for the Trump administration’s roundup.

These Faustian bargains have made Pennsylvania the most prolific such collaborator outside the South.

We previously noted Mr Bunch’s wholly one-sided reporting on the subject, telling our two readers what Mr Bunch did not: that two of the three ‘models’ apply to illegal immigrants who have already been topped or arrested for other crimes, and who may already be in jail. The third ‘model’ allows local police to check on the immigration status of those stopped due to enforcement actions for violations that have nothing to do with immigration violations. The 287(g) program is spotlighting those people in the country illegally who have been breaking other laws as well.

Schuylkill County? In the 2024 election, the voters in Schuylkill County gave 51,665 of their votes, 70.60% of the total, to Mr Trump, and only 20,882 votes, 28.53%, to Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, the purported ‘border tsar’ who either supported, or was unable to change President Joe Biden’s virtual open border policies.

Pennsylvania’s voters as a whole gave a majority of their votes to President Trump, albeit narrowly, though if you exclude foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, Mr Trump’s victory in the Keystone State approaches a landslide margin.

Under what’s known as the 287(g) program, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has set aside about a quarter-billion dollars from an unprecedented congressional windfall to help it deputize state and local law enforcement agencies. Fourteen departments in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County have collected more than $1.5 million of that for cars and equipment in exchange for their help arresting more than 100 people for detention and deportation.

Sounds to me as though those 14 departments are following the will of the vast majority of their voters.

As with the nationwide dragnet, and in contrast to the Trump campaign’s promise to target immigrants who commit serious crimes, the Pennsylvania arrests have largely affected people presenting no known danger to their communities. More than two-thirds of those arrested by the state’s law enforcement agencies under the federal program had no criminal record. And judging by the stories of natural-born citizens caught in the coal region surge, some of them didn’t have an immigration record, either. That’s also in keeping with ICE’s practice of sweeping up citizens and legal residents along with undocumented people based on little more than their complexions.

This is the kind of silliness that our good friends on the left usually parrot: that many have no criminal records. But if they are here illegally, and thus subject to deportation, it simply means that they hadn’t been caught previously.

So, how does the 287(g) program work?

• The Jail Enforcement Model allows designated immigration officers to identify and process removable aliens who have pending or active criminal charges.
• The Warrant Service Officer Model allows designated immigration officers to serve and execute administrative warrants on aliens in their custody.
• The Task Force Model enhances public safety and national security by allowing designated immigration officers to enforce limited immigration authority while performing routine police duties or as an active participant in an ICE-led task force.

The people apprehended or later identified for ICE notification have already run afoul of the law in some manner. That some are identified as being in the country illegally means that other crimes they have committed have been discovered.

There’s more. Mr Bunch’s referenced column noted that an enforcement operation conducted in Orwigsburg was at a construction jobsite. Under federal law, non-citizens cannot work in the United States legally unless they have a ‘green card,’ permitting them to do so. If there were illegals working at that jobsite, either they had:

• presented faked or forged documents for their employers to fill out Form I-9; or
• they working for cash ‘under the table, which means they were probably evading income and Social Security taxes.

Both of those things are felonies. If their employers knowingly accepted forged documents or simply ignored filling out Form I-9, they also committed crimes.

It’s simple: the Editorial Board think that, unlike their opinions on President Trump and his Administration, some people, particularly illegal immigrants should be above the law.