Tensions run high in Bucks County over planned ICE alliance. Sheriff says he’s being slandered with ‘Holocaust-era language.’

Bucks County commissioners questioned aspects of the sheriff’s plan to have his deputies help ICE enforce immigration laws, saying they were reviewing its legality and troubled about potential financial liability.

Board Vice Chairperson Diane Ellis-Marseglia said on Wednesday she supported both law enforcement agencies, but, “We want ICE to do ICE and sheriff to do sheriff.”

She spoke during a tense commissioners meeting where about 200 people crowded the hall to endorse and condemn the proposal.

The first speaker questioned if the immigration activists who oppose the initiative had a financial incentive for doing so. The second called on the commissioners to stop what he described as a political stunt by the sheriff.

One resident called immigration supporters idiots, another accused former President Joe Biden of treason for his border policies, and a third blamed undocumented people for crime, including killings and child-trafficking.

Other speakers, opposed to a local alliance with ICE, told the commissioners that the partnership was a bad idea, morally, legally, and financially.

Shortly after the meeting began, the man at the center of the discord rose to speak. Sheriff Fred Harran strode to the microphone at the front of the hall — and criticized the commissioners over a school-related issue, never mentioning the swirling ICE controversy.

He also urged them to listen to a new law-and-order podcast that his office is about to launch.

Harran said afterward that there was no point in trying to explain the entirety of the ICE partnership in the three minutes allotted to him. And he noted the commissioners asked him no questions about it, despite having the opportunity.

The sheriff’s department intends to join a controversial partnership program known as “287(g),” where local police actively assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The department would be the first in the Philadelphia region to collaborate with ICE under the initiative, named for a section of a 1996 immigration law.

» READ MORE: Bucks County sheriff wants to help ICE enforce immigration laws through a controversial partnership program

Harran insists the alliance would not be used “for immigration sweeps, random checks, or broad enforcement,” but that “those who commit crimes must face the consequences regardless of immigration status.”

Opponents say participation in the 287(g) program inevitably leads to racial profiling by local police. They maintain it fractures trust between police and the communities they serve, and deprives local taxpayers of the full services for which they’re paying.

Board of Commissioners Chairperson Bob Harvie Jr. said the county’s lawyers were reviewing the agreement that Harran signed, which has yet to be formally approved by ICE.

He said the proposed partnership provided no coverage to the county for liability, meaning taxpayers would bear the cost of attorneys and legal settlements if lawsuits followed an immigration incident.

He noted that some speakers cited the program’s potential impact on county tourism and reputation, if visitors stayed away from what they perceived as an unwelcoming place.

Tourism, he said, is a major county industry, injecting more than a billion dollars a year into the local economy.

The caustic debate in Bucks County comes as President Donald Trump seeks to carry out what he claims will be the largest deportation effort in American history, one in which he has called on state and local law enforcement agencies for help.

As of Wednesday, ICE has signed 523 agreements — up by more than 50 in roughly the last two weeks — with police in 38 states.

Bucks was the only county in the Philadelphia region to vote for Trump last year. Harran, a Republican who is up for reelection, has consistently clashed with the Democratic-controlled board of commissioners in recent months.

ICE officials said Tuesday that they had no comment on the situation in Bucks County, where the discussion has turned rancorous.

Harran said this week that some opponents have used “Holocaust-era language” to slander him as the state’s only Jewish sheriff, rhetoric he said was “deeply offensive and has no place in Bucks County.”

Commenters on the sheriff’s department Facebook page said Harran was behaving like “a Nazi” and making his department part of “the modern-day Gestapo.”

“You sound like a Nazi sympathizer, or collaborator, and you know what happened to them once the forces of good overpowered the forces of evil,” one woman wrote.

At a hearing last week on student online safety in Northampton Township, a woman asked Harran if he planned to “round up immigrants,” called him a Nazi, and warned him to stay out of the community, reported NewtownPAnow.com.

Heidi Roux, executive director of Immigrant Rights Action, said Wednesday that such attacks were wrong. “I denounce that language and that rhetoric,” she said.

She spoke as a coalition of civil rights and immigration groups gathered outside the county Justice Center, stating their opposition to 287(g) at a news conference before the commissioners met.

Harran has described his department’s involvement as a “narrowly defined initiative focused on public safety,” one in which 12 of the department’s 76 deputies would be trained to access a federal database, identifying people taken into custody on criminal charges and who have outstanding warrants in Bucks County.

But immigration activists dispute that, saying the program would allow sheriff’s deputies to ask anyone about their legal status and to serve warrants for immigration violations, turning local officers into de facto ICE agents.

Jurisdictions that have rejected the 287(g) program say they pay their police officers to enforce local laws and assist local residents, not to do the work of the federal government.

They fear losing the cooperation of immigrant crime victims and witnesses. And some police departments dropped out of the program after Lehigh County and Allentown authorities were successfully sued for keeping a man of Puerto Rican descent in prison so that ICE could investigate whether he was in the country illegally.

That settlement cost taxpayers $145,000.

About 70 people attended the news conference, where leaders from NAACP Bucks County, Make the Road Pennsylvania, CASA, and the ACLU called on Harran to abandon his plan.

Solomon Furious Worlds, a staff attorney at the ACLU, told the crowd that legal settlements and attorneys’ fees follow agencies that join with ICE.

“Signing on to a 287(g) agreement is signing on for more taxes,” he said.

Speakers pledged to force the plan’s dismissal through public outcry and by appealing to the county commissioners and the state legislature.

“We ask that our sheriff’s department do not become ICE agents,” Roux told the crowd. “We support the sheriff’s effort to catch more criminals, and we believe the only way to do that is if everyone in Bucks County is comfortable reporting crime.”