The Bucks County Sheriff’s Office is ending its partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), citing a desire to ease fears within their immigrant community and enhance public safety.
Bucks County Sheriff Danny Ceisler made the announcement during a press conference on Wednesday, Jan. 14, outside the Bucks County Justice Center on North Main Street in Doylestown.
“After careful evaluation, I have determined that the certain public safety costs of this ICE partnership are greatly outweighed by any potential public safety benefits that this partnership may offer,” Ceisler said. “That is why this morning I signed an order terminating the 287(g) partnership between the Bucks County Sheriff’s Office and ICE.”
Bucks County ICE controversy
In April 2025, Fred Harran — who was the Bucks County Sheriff at the time – announced a plan for his office to partner with ICE under the 287(g) agreement, allowing local law enforcement agencies to become deputized to perform immigration enforcement.
“The 287(g) program dates back to the Clinton administration but has been far more widely used during the Trump administration, particularly during the second Trump administration, as a method to assist in the administration’s stated goals of deporting over one million men, women and children per year,” Ceisler said.
Ceisler explained that 287(g) partnerships can take the forms of jail enforcement, warrant service or a task force, with the task force model granting “exceptionally broad authority” to local law enforcement agencies.
“It allows officers to stop, interrogate and detain anybody who they believe is in the country without current authorization,” Ceisler said.
Harran described the task force as a “common-sense initiative” that allowed select deputies in his office to utilize a federal immigration database and identify individuals who were in the country illegally and were taken into custody based on existing criminal charges and outstanding warrants in Bucks County.
Harran defended his efforts to work with ICE during an appearance on NBC10 @Issue and Battleground Politics with Lauren Mayk. Harran insisted the task force would only go after those who were charged with crimes in the Bucks County region.
“What is so bad about making the arrests, which we do now, but now, afterwards, ship them out so they can’t commit crimes tomorrow? Because our courts, our judicial system, our prisons are packed,” Harran said. “They cannot hold the amount of people. So why not save the U.S. taxpayer dollar and ship them back to the country they came from? Only those people that have already been charged with a crime. I’m not talking about somebody owning a pizza shop or working a landscape company. That’s not who we’re talking about here.”
Harran’s initial announcement of the plan led to considerable backlash, including a lawsuit from the ACLU of Pennsylvania, Make the Road Pennsylvania, NAACP Bucks County, and the BuxMont Unitarian Universalists. The lawsuit – which was filed in September 2025 – accused the sheriff of making the move illegally and claimed that the decision should have been made by the Bucks County Commissioners.
Bucks County Judge Hon. Jeffrey Trauger sided with Harran in an October 2025 ruling, however.
“Today’s court ruling is a victory for the law-abiding residents of Bucks County and a validation of a common-sense approach to public safety which fully leverages partnerships and resources to keep our communities safe,” Harran said at the time. “This decision affirms our ability to use this simple tool to ensure individuals who commit crimes in our county are held fully accountable – regardless of their immigration status.”
A month after the ruling however, Harran – a Republican – was ousted by his Democratic challenger Danny Ceisler in the Bucks County sheriff’s race. Ceisler won by a margin of about 15% as part of a “blue wave” in a county that was long considered “purple” as far as politics.
After his victory, Ceisler, a U.S. Army veteran, attorney and former public safety official in the Shapiro administration, assumed office on Jan. 5, 2026.
During Wednesday’s announcement, Ceisler said 16 deputies in Bucks County had received expanded immigration authority under Harran though no immigrants had actually been detained. While explaining his decision to end the partnership, Ceisler talked about Bucks County’s community of over 50,000 immigrants, primarily from India, South Asia, Latin America, Liberia and Ukraine.
“Those immigrants are our neighbors. They are our friends. They are taxpayers,” Ceisler said. “And they deserve the protection of law enforcement in this community.”
Ceisler said he received feedback from immigration leaders in the community who told him immigrants were living in fear under the county’s ICE partnership.
“One leader in the Latino community who wasn’t able to make it today reported to me that not a single member of their community had called 911 or felt comfortable reporting a crime since this partnership became public,” Ceisler said. “They feared that local law enforcement responding to a crime they reported would take them too.”
Ceisler said tensions with ICE across the country also amplified those fears.
“We have seen good, law-abiding residents who are doing everything right to earn their citizenship detained and deported by the Trump administration,” Ceisler said.
In addition to terminating his office’s partnership with ICE, Ceisler also signed an additional order prohibiting his deputies from asking crime victims, witnesses, or court observers about their immigration status.
Despite the ending of the partnership, Ceisler insisted Bucks County will not be a so-called “sanctuary county.”
“We will ensure that actual dangerous criminals who are in the country illegally are deported, which has been standard practice in Bucks County for decades,” Ceisler said.
Officials also said the Bucks County Department of Corrections will continue to share information with ICE regarding its inmate population and ICE will also have 24/7 access to the county jail.
Wednesday afternoon, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson sent NBC10 a statement on Ceisler’s decision.
“This announcement will only make law-abiding Bucks County residents less safe. Jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with ICE simply let illegal criminals roam their streets,” Jackson wrote. “These types of actions won’t stop ICE and the federal government from enforcing the law, they will only make it significantly more challenging to get dangerous criminal illegals off American streets and put innocent Americans in harms way.”
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