These rural Pennsylvania counties found themselves on the Trump administration’s list of ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ — and say it has to be a mistake

In three rural Pennsylvania counties where President Donald Trump won by more than 20 percentage points, local leaders woke up to a surprise on Friday: they had been placed on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security list of local governments noncompliant with federal immigration law, their federal funding now at risk.

These GOP-controlled counties never held so-called sanctuary policies surrounding immigration. In fact, the only “sanctuary” policies some of them have were implemented in response to sanctuary initiatives elsewhere, intended to reaffirm their allegiances to the federal government’s rule of law when Democratic areas promised to buck it.

In central Pennsylvania’s Montour County, which was named on the DHS list Thursday, the commissioners passed a resolution in 2021 making the 18,000-resident county a “Bill of Rights Sanctuary County.” Clarion County, a Western Pennsylvania county of about 37,000 residents that also made the Homeland Security list, passed a resolution naming itself as a “Second Amendment Sanctuary County” in 2021 doubling down on gun rights and declining to enforce any law that restricts gun access.

But the counties’ support for Trump, who campaigned on his immigration policies, and GOP-led local governments didn’t keep them from Homeland Security’s crosshairs.

The Trump administration has been threatening for months that it will withhold federal funding from state and local governments that defy federal executive orders, as Trump fulfills his aggressive immigration agenda. The list of localities the government now says is at risk of losing federal dollars was released Thursday and included 16 Pennsylvania cities and counties, many of them controlled by Democrats, including Philadelphia, as well as the entire state of New Jersey. The federal government has not set a definition of what makes up a sanctuary city, and many of the local Democratic leaders say they are in compliance with federal immigration law and will work with ICE if asked.

But local officials in the rural Pennsylvania counties say they believe their designations as “sanctuary jurisdictions” is a mistake, and insisted that they comply with federal immigration law.

“We are almost certainly on the list by mistake, and I believe you will see our name removed in the near future,” Christopher Gabriel, Clarion County’s solicitor, said in an email.

These counties have fought the allegations of being sanctuary jurisdictions for years, local officials said, after they were added to a frequently recirculated national list of sanctuary cities, compiled by an anti-immigration group.

Officials from both Clarion and Montour Counties said they were added to a list of sanctuary counties from the right-wing think tank Center for Immigration Studies, likely because of previous versions of their local prison policies that required a signed warrant to detain someone on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Those policies have been updated in recent years, officials said. In Montour County, for example, the policy was rewritten to make clear that the county’s prison will notify ICE when a warrant is not present for someone who ICE wants to detain so that the county prison can transfer custody if requested, Montour County Commissioner Rebecca Dressler said in an email.

Both counties were eventually able to get themselves removed from the CIS list, they said, but not without a lot of headache and false information swirling around their communities that local law enforcement had been directed not to comply with Homeland Security officials.

Braxton White, the lone Democratic commissioner on the Clarion County three-member board, said DHS should have looked at an election map to realize a rural Pennsylvania county that supported Trump 76-24 does not support sanctuary city policies, he said.

“There is no way that a county that voted for Trump at that level would support a sanctuary policy,” White said. “There’s not a universe where Clarion County would be electing people to do that.”

White, who joined the Clarion County Board of Commissioners in 2024, said he has spent much of his time on the board over the last year and a half responding to concerns that the county had a sanctuary policy and was harboring illegal immigrants from ICE.

Adams County, another GOP-stronghold where Gettysburg is the county seat, was also named this week on the DHS list. Local officials did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

William McKenna, the sheriff for Montour County, said his department recently applied for the federal 287(g) program through the Department of Homeland Security to better collaborate with ICE. He reaffirmed that his county will work with ICE when requested, though in his 11 years as sheriff, he has only seen the agency come through the rural county once.

“The law is the law. There are things on both sides that not everybody likes,” said William McKenna, the sheriff for Montour County. “We must follow the laws we have in place. That helps make a civilized society.”