Williamsport.

ICE paid over $100 million for a warehouse in our county and announced plans to hold 1,500 people inside it. It isn't a one-off. It's one of sixteen "processing centers" ICE is building nationwide, part of a deliberate plan to detain immigrants in warehouses the agency owns outright. The acting director described the model himself: "Prime, but with human beings." That's not my word for the cruelty. It's theirs. A detention center is going up and the people it's built to hold are, overwhelmingly, people who committed no crime.

The deportation machine.

Last year's budget bill handed ICE $45 billion for detention alone, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government — bigger than the FBI, bigger than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. The goal, stated out loud, is a million deportations a year. To hit it, ICE arrests people at courthouses, at check-ins, at work, in their own driveways. Roughly three of every four it detains have no criminal record. Releases have nearly stopped. And 2025 was the deadliest year in the history of immigration detention. The agency's detention budget now rivals what it costs to run the entire federal prison system — to lock up gardeners and line cooks.

Abolish ICE. Rebuild it accountable.

An agency this powerful, operating with this little oversight, disappearing people into a system where their families can't locate them for days, cannot be fixed around the edges. ICE as it exists should be dissolved. Immigration enforcement belongs under the Department of Justice, inside a structure with courts, due process, and real accountability — not a standalone agency that answers to almost no one and runs a warehouse of human beings like a fulfillment center.

Enforcement isn't the problem. Unaccountable enforcement is.

Stop deputizing local cops.

287(g) agreements turn local police into immigration agents. The result is predictable: families stop calling 911, stop reporting crimes, stop coming forward as witnesses, because any contact with a badge now risks deportation. That makes everyone less safe — citizen and noncitizen alike. End 287(g), and let local police do the job they were actually hired to do.

They're welding the front door shut.

The same people who demand immigrants "do it the legal way" are dismantling every legal way to do it. In June 2026, the Supreme Court let the government turn asylum seekers away at the border before they can even ask for protection — ruling that a person physically blocked at a port of entry hasn't legally "arrived." The same day, it let the administration strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and Syrians who fled gang slaughter and civil war, and held that no court is even allowed to review the decision. Refugee resettlement has been gutted. The immigration courts meant to hear these cases are starved while enforcement drowns in cash.

Restore the right to seek asylum. Protect TPS holders and give those families a permanent status Congress can't strip on a whim. Rebuild refugee resettlement, and fund the courts to actually function. A legal system you've quietly demolished isn't a legal system anyone can use.

A path for the people already here.

For the millions who have lived here for years — working, paying taxes, raising kids, holding up whole industries — there is still no legal way to make any of it permanent. They were our neighbors before any of this started. Give them an earned path to citizenship, and fix a system Congress hasn't seriously updated since 1986.