Deportations are up 80% in Pennsylvania and Jersey amid Trump’s aggressive tactics

Edwin Nicolas Sanchez Pachon was following the rules required of him to perhaps one day become a permanent legal resident of the U.S. Then, the rules suddenly changed.

The asylum seeker from Colombia had been in the country since 2022. He told friends he’d fled genuine danger at home in Bogota, where his mother’s ex-boyfriend assaulted him, threatened his family, and sent gang members to stalk them. Sanchez Pachon, 23, settled in Bethlehem, found a job as a warehouse worker, and became one of tens of thousands of immigrants waiting for their petitions for asylum to work its way through Philadelphia’s backlogged immigration court.

On June 2, Sanchez Pachon went to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Philadelphia to check in, as is required of those on supervision pending a final decision on their asylum cases.

But instead of letting him log in at one of the lobby kiosks, ICE officers called him upstairs.

They didn’t let him leave.

His friend, Mariana King, said she heard from him three days later, by phone from the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. She said he described the tense scene at the Center City ICE office as he was picked up in what seemed to be a mass arrest.

“There was people crying. There was a lady separated from her daughter,” she said. “He said it was like 30 of them that got detained.”

Detaining asylum seekers and other immigrants with no criminal histories is one of several tactics that President Donald Trump’s administration is now using to ramp up deportations. At the same office where Sanchez Pachon was detained, dozens of immigrants were called on short notice for unexplained check-ins on June 15 — Father’s Day — and about six were detained.

The government is also fast-tracking removals with abridged due process, incentivizing immigrants to “self-deport” voluntarily, and enforcing removal orders that had been ignored for years or even decades.

A half dozen immigration lawyers who spoke with The Inquirer said the moves have short-circuited due process, making it increasingly difficult for them to advocate for their clients — or even, in some cases, to speak with them.

But the new policies have so far helped the Trump administration in its stated goal of increasing deportations. The number of people deported each month from Pennsylvania and New Jersey combined exceeded 2,000 in March and was even higher in April — about 80% above the typical month in 2024, before Trump took office, according to an Inquirer analysis of federal immigration data.

Trump claims to be deporting violent criminals. But the surge in deportations was made possible by targeting people who have no criminal histories and have for years been complying with the rules of their supervision.

The move to fast-track deportation proceedings for people who have been in the country less than two years was authorized by Trump’s January executive order, titled “Protecting the American People against Invasion.” How federal authorities choose which cases to expedite remains unclear and is not detailed in the executive order. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple immigration lawyers said DHS has been seeking to terminate immigrants’ court cases, clearing the way to deport them without a hearing.

Once cases are dismissed, agents are often waiting to detain them in courthouse hallways around the country, according to news reports.

Steven A. Morley, a Philadelphia immigration judge from 2010 to 2022, described the current situation as “ugly” and highly unusual. Until recently, “there had been a policy of no ICE agents in a courtroom,” he said.

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At Philadelphia’s immigration court at Ninth and Market Streets, lawyers who spoke with The Inquirer said there have been arrests in the lobby within the past week or two.

On June 12, a man who identified himself only as Junior was at that court’s information counter trying to track down the location of a friend whom he’d accompanied to court that morning. He described his friend as a Nicaraguan national who had come to the U.S. with his family three or four years ago to avoid threats faced back home.

Junior said ICE agents waiting in the lobby grabbed his friend and whisked him off to detention.

“They just took him,” he said. The clerk handed Junior an ICE phone number written on a sticky note. He braced himself to tell the man’s family the news.

“I just wanted to help him,” he said, before hurrying away. “I gotta go figure this out.”

The individuals detained at Philadelphia’s immigration courthouse are most often sent to the local Federal Detention Center, or to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Western Pennsylvania. The population at Moshannon has been close to 1,600 in recent weeks, the highest since the detention center opened in 2021, according to lawyers and a current detainee. (DHS did not respond to a request for population data, but federal data put the number at 1,300 in May. The facility’s max population is 1,876.)

Sanchez Pachon is now in Moshannon — about four hours’ drive from his lawyer, Michael Renneisen, who said he still has not been able to speak with his client.

“To fight the case from detention is much more difficult,” Renneisen said. He said such removal cases have been moving more quickly than in the past. “Judges have been pushing hearing dates in a way that makes it very difficult to be prepared.”

Amid crowding at detention facilities and court backlogs, lawyers have sometimes had to fight for weeks to learn why their clients were detained, said immigration lawyer Robert Barchiesi. One of his clients was held in custody for a month without receiving an explanation for the detention, let alone a case number, according to a federal petition he filed in May.

In some cases, the reason for detention appears to be simply that detention beds were available, he said. Paperwork reviewed by The Inquirer showed one person was hit with a “custody redetermination,” based on an open bed and the asylum seeker’s failure to apply for a required document.

And people who, in the past, would have been eligible for bond are now being denied. Judges say that higher court rulings made clear they no longer have jurisdiction to grant it.

On Monday, Barchiesi sought bond for a Brazilian man detained in the Pike County Correctional Facility, a county jail that contracts with ICE to house about 100 people in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The Elizabeth, N.J., immigration judge, Tamar Wilson, turned down the request, telling his client: “I cannot grant your request for bond, because I do not have the authority to do so.”

Philadelphia immigration lawyer Caitlin Costello said she has seen more clients trapped in detention based on those decisions. She said many are accepting deportation to countries — even though they believe their lives are in danger there — either because they can’t afford to continue paying a lawyer to fight their case, or because they support their families financially and “couldn’t afford” to sit in detention.

Some who accepted deportation had strong asylum claims, she said.

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Costello said she now anticipates that all clients with outstanding removal orders are also at risk. Some have been working and raising children who are U.S. citizens while their removal orders sat unenforced for a decade or longer. She said some had been allowed to stay because their cases were not deemed priorities, or they were from countries with which the U.S. did not maintain diplomatic relations.

“It used to be, if they had a removal order but no criminal history and nothing else negative … ICE exercises its discretion to say we’re not going to remove this person,” she said. “Now that’s out the window.”

The government’s new legal strategies come as immigration courts nationwide struggle under towering caseloads.

The number of pending cases in Philadelphia more than tripled over the last five years, to more than 85,000 cases. In recent weeks, judges were issuing court dates for hearings in asylum cases as far out as 2027.

The Executive Office of Immigration Review said the court is committed to reducing the national backlog but declined to comment on specific court policies.

“For a second month in a row, the total pending caseload of immigration court cases has fallen by more than 100,000 cases,” agency spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said.

The number of asylum applications denied each month in Philadelphia more than doubled in April, compared to the monthly average over the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency, federal data show.

The government is also pushing to reopen other cases that had been in administrative closure for years because they were deemed to be complex and low-priority, immigration lawyers said.

Costello said that recently happened to a client who’d arrived here as a child and had multiple promising paths to permanent residence.

From her courtroom overlooking Market Street last week, Judge Dawn Kulick grew exasperated as her morning caseload carried into the afternoon. She spent nearly half an hour trying to schedule a single hearing for an asylum case with a Kotokoli interpreter for a Ghanaian immigrant.

“I have about five years’ worth of cases that need hearing dates,” a frustrated Kulick told attorneys.

When court resumed that afternoon, a DHS attorney pushed to dismiss a Haitian man’s case immediately.

The man appeared confused. He, like more than half of immigrants with pending cases in Philadelphia, did not have an attorney. Kulick, though a Creole interpreter, gave him two weeks to file a written objection in English.

The judge expressed optimism that her calendar would open up due to voluntary deportations — which, under the Trump administration, may come with a $1,000 incentive for any undocumented person who willingly returns to their homeland.

Fliers advertising that offer are posted in the courthouse. According to Peter Alfredson, a senior attorney with the D.C.-based Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the offer is now included in every government court filing. One client received the flier in the same envelope as documents announcing the asylum petition was approved, granting legal residency.

“They want to create a sense of fear and chaos,” Alfredson said. “It’s very hard for people to not want to give up, even if there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Since 2019, U.S. immigration authorities had seen fit to allow Indra to remain in Harrisburg with his family — even though he had a deportation order.

He’d arrived there four years earlier, as a refugee in his early 20s, according to his lawyer, Craig Shagin — part of a Nepali-speaking family from Bhutan who fled persecution from the Buddhist government and its nationalist ethnic cleansing campaign.

The deportation order was filed after he was arrested in 2018 for driving while intoxicated and fleeing from police, court records show. But the government found it couldn’t send him back to a country where he had no lawful citizenship. Instead, ICE placed Indra under supervisory status, Shagin said, requiring periodic check-ins but otherwise leaving the removal order unenforced.

Since then, he has had no further criminal cases, his life stabilized and he found work at a local warehouse, Shagin said.

Then, in April, ICE agents showed up at his home. Indra, whose family asked only his first name be used out of fear of retaliation, was detained and sent to Moshannon.

Shagin said it took weeks to schedule a phone call with his client, as the detention center is now overcrowded and phone slots are limited.

In a petition filed in federal court in April, he argued his client was born in a Nepali refugee camp with no legal right to live in his homeland. Harrisburg, a hub for more than 40,000 resettled Bhutanese people, was his home. Many in his family are now U.S. citizens. Shagin also noted that Indra’s more serious conviction for fleeing an officer had been vacated — and further, a federal court ruled in January that it no longer amounted to a deportable offense.

But the deportation carried forward. Days before their scheduled phone call, Indra was transferred to Pike County, on the other end of the state.

Such transfers between facilities have increased in lockstep with rising deportations, said attorney Amelia Degen of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. That’s exacerbated difficulties in representing clients, who may be under shifting court jurisdiction with each successive transfer.

Degen had a client, an Uzbekistan national, who was transferred between three facilities in a matter of weeks — including a stint at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, where ICE now reserves about 100 beds for temporary detention, she said.

“The bed space is running out nationwide,” she said. When attorneys try to file petitions to release their clients, “they often won’t be in the same facility or even in the same district or state.”

As for Indra, two days after his transfer out of Moshannon, he was sending his family messages on WhatsApp from India. He never got a chance to speak with Shagin and was deported without his family’s knowledge.

He is now stateless.

“The president says they’re sending their criminals, their insane,” Shagin said. “But [Indra] was sent to a Bhutan airport, where the government would not let him into the country, then driven by car, and dumped in a refugee city in India with no papers.”

Data editor Stephen Stirling contributed data analysis to this article.