We have previously noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far left columnist Will Bunch and his adamant support for the rule of law.

Mr Bunch even wrote that he did not “like” President Biden’s final flurry of pardons “at all,” though he claimed that “they were understandable” to protect critics of then-incoming President Trump. Clearly, Mr Bunch believed the Democrats mantra of “no one is above the law,” used when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in prison.

But now? It seems that he doesn’t like the enforcement of our laws even one little bit!

Next-door states banned ICE-cop deals. Why not Pa.? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Plus, the threat to human civilization that isn’t AI.

by Will Bunch | Columnist | Tuesday, September 15, 2026 | 11:46 AM EDT

The big, mostly under-the-radar story around the Donald Trump regime’s relentless push to arrest and remove immigrants from the United States has been this year’s explosion of so-called 287(g) agreements. These allow local cops to act as immigration agents, working collaboratively with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

But if you look at a national map to understand how these 287(g) agreements have spiked from just 135 when Trump retook office in January 2025 to more than 2,500 such pacts today, you’ll notice that one state sticks out like a sore thumb.

I can understand why there were so few local law enforcement agencies participating prior to President Trump’s second inauguration: they knew that, under the Joe Biden Administration, notifying ICE about illegals apprehended meant nothing.

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 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 Warrant Service Officer Model allows designated immigration officers to serve and execute administrative warrants on aliens in their custody.

Note that two of the three ‘models’ apply to illegal immigrants who have already been 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.

Of course, you have to look that up yourself, because Mr Bunch didn’t tell his readers that.

In Pennsylvania, amped-up promises of federal cash incentives have meant a soaring number of localities where local beat cops are now working with ICE to make arrests — up from just a handful at the start of the year to some 130 now. Most 287(g) collaborators are in Trump-voting pockets of the Keystone State — northeast and south-central Pennsylvania, or out west near the Ohio border.

Mr Bunch makes it sound as though there are just a few “Trump-voting pockets” in Pennsylvania, but that’s not quite accurate. Pennsylvanians as a whole voted for Mr Trump! Yes, it was close, 3,543,308 (50.37%) to 3,423, 042 (48.66%), but if you throw out the votes of Philadelphia, as should always be done to get to the true Pennsylvanians among whom I was once one, Mr Trump won 3,398,997 (53.84%) to 2,854,471 (45.21%), almost a landslide.

“No one is above the law,” our good friends on the left say, but then they turn around and tell us that yes, they think that illegal immigrants — we do not use the mealy-mouthed “undocumented migrants” term here — ought to be above the law, certainly above our immigration laws.

The columnist then gives readers several more paragraphs on the politics of the case, all one-sidedly Democratic, but there’s one point he cannot get around: the people who are here illegally are here illegally, and the law says that they have to go home.

It’s kind an amusing conclusion that Mr Bunch then adds:

The issue of wrongful convictions is back in the news here in Philadelphia — but for all the wrong reasons. Some reckless and seemingly wrongheaded moves by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and his underlings have the vultures who’ve always opposed criminal justice reform circling. The shame is that the real crisis around wrongful conviction is the thousands of mostly Black and brown folks who remain behind bars for crimes they did not commit. I cannot say enough about a book that came out earlier this year from the Brown University (yay!) sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve called Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction. She mines the most outrageous prosecutions — often of young Black teens and boys — to make a compelling argument that wrongful convictions aren’t a flaw in the criminal justice system. They are the system.

That’s quite the paragraph, but it is amusing that Mr Bunch linked an article which soft-peddled the problems the District Attorney faces, rather than one also from Tuesday’s Inquirer, “A federal judge believes DA Larry Krasner may have broken the law, and he referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office: U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond said he believed Krasner and one of his top supervisors, Matthew Stiegler, may have committed perjury, conspiracy, or obstruction of justice.” That article was published a few hours after Mr Bunch’s column, but that the Judge believes he had been lied to by Mr Krasnere and some of his minions has been known for a while now. Possible perjury, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice are more than “reckless and seemingly wrongheaded moves”; they are actual crimes.

Mr Krasner was greatly angered that President Trump pardoned the January 6 Capitol kerfufflers, and said he wanted to look for state charges against them, even though the vast majority of those pardoned had already served their federal sentences.

It’s certainly true that we “vultures who’ve always opposed criminal justice reform circling” oppose Mr Krasner’s form of reform, that of simply letting crimes go unpunished, at least unpunished beyond a not-very-hard slap on the wrist. We noted on Monday that the District Attorney’s Office allowed Zaakir McClendon to plead guilty to third-degree murder in exchange for a sentence which could allow him to eventually be released, when Mr McClendon killed not one person but two, several months apart, in cases which merited a first-degree murder conviction and life wce allowed Zaakir McClendon to ithout the possibility of parole sentence.

Mr Krasner and Mr Bunch seem to share the same prosecutorial belief: police officers, white offenders, and Republicans should be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law, while “black and brown” criminals deserve every break possible.