Tag: Cumberland County

MOUNT HOLLY SPRINGS, Pa. — Still hailed for its trout fishing, this bucolic Central Pennsylvania borough in the shadow of South Mountain was a big draw for tourists at the turn of the 20th century who flocked here to cool off in its mineral-spring waters.

In 2026, this tiny municipality about 25 miles southwest of Harrisburg is developing a much less welcoming reputation. The new notoriety began with an agreement between borough police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that has turned Mount Holly Springs into a kind of “speed trap” for unsuspecting immigrants — one with life-altering consequences.

What had been a simmering small-town controversy since the start of the year boiled over into an international incident on July 15 when a prominent Chinese dissident and U.S. asylum seeker named Wu Shaoping was pulled over by a borough officer who claimed Wu had blown through a stop sign. The Amazon delivery driver was then taken into custody by ICE agents who had been running an operation just down the road.

But the outcry over the arrest and detention of Wu — taken to ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center and crammed into a room with 60 other detainees for 10 days before winning his release on bail — also exposed an even darker story.

In March, Mount Holly Springs became the only municipality in Cumberland County and one of a handful across Pennsylvania to execute a formal cooperation agreement with ICE under a controversial program known as 287(g). The program gives local cops expanded powers to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants, while offering training and financial incentives in return.

In just four months, the borough’s four police officers have pulled over and checked the status of dozens of motorists — mainly commercial truck drivers — and turned over 32 arrestees to ICE, the Mount Holly Springs Police Chief Tom Day told me on Wednesday.

Day, a gruff ex-Marine in a Nittany Lions cap and blue jeans who doubles as borough manager, insisted to me that the traffic stops and ICE cooperation have nothing to do with racial profiling and everything to do with road safety in a borough with aging bridges and narrow streets.

“There’s no racial profiling of or ethnic profiling of drivers,” the police chief maintained. “We have no clue until we step up on the side of that truck who we’re even dealing with.” Day also said “it’s not that we don’t have a heart” — that he believes in the American dream and understands why refugees want to come here, but when immigrants show up without permission “actions have consequences, you know.”

Minutes later, I met with a gaggle of local residents and business owners who told a very different story — that the wave of immigrant arrests has created a climate of fear that permeates Mount Holly Springs. The growing uproar has riven their once-placid borough into a distrustful cauldron of angry Facebook comments, muttered asides, and occasional threats — a kind of modern civil war just 25 miles north of Gettysburg.

“What I’m hearing from my customers, our people are afraid,” said Rachel Bear, the co-owner of a popular local boutique. “Immigrants are afraid. It’s out there.” She said she’s decided to speak out against the borough’s relationship with ICE because some neighbors are intimidated. “I think they’re just scared.”

Andrew Dapkins, the owner of The “Bird Guy” Tours of local wildlife, told me he’s stopped bringing his excursions into Mount Holly Springs since the deal with ICE was signed. “If I was to bring someone of color, or they were not heterosexual male, I would feel like I was bringing them into a potential hostile environment,” he explained. “So I can’t do that.”

What’s happened in Mount Holly Springs since the ICE program began this winter feels in many ways like a microcosm of Donald Trump’s America. It’s the rage, distrust, and paranoia that only metastasizes as the demagogue’s fiery campaign tirades get translated into harsh reality at a small-town stop sign.

But it’s also exactly the chaos that some immigration policy experts warned about when the Trump regime dramatically expanded the 287(g) program, named for a section of 1996 federal immigration law that grants broader immigration enforcement powers to trained state or local police.

Despite warnings about the potential for racial profiling and seeding distrust in immigrant communities, the number of 287(g) agreements has exploded from a few dozen when Trump first became president in 2017 to more than 2,000 today, with at least 88 on the books now across Pennsylvania.

Still, the immigration arrest total in tiny Mount Holly Springs, which covers just 1.4 square miles and has a population of fewer than 2,500 residents, seems staggering. As recently as February, there were only 67 monthly immigration arrests by local police across the entire state. But now this one borough is on a pace for nearly 100 arrests in just one year.

“This is an agenda that’s being driven by numbers for numbers’ sake,” Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told me Thursday. “There is an arrest quota that the White House is pushing, and they’re leaning on local police departments to do that work for them” — even as that work paralyzes local immigrants when they learn of increased traffic stops.

“Communities become afraid to go to the grocery store, to go to work every day, to use public transit, even,” Gupta said.

There have been festering recriminations in Mount Holly Springs since January, when residents first learned that Day — seen as a local power broker because of his dual role and his close allies on borough council — had signed the paperwork with ICE to become a 287(g) department. A handful of angry residents denounced the plan — revealed at the same time as two ICE-related killings in Minneapolis sparked national outrage. But the lone Democrat on the seven-member board, Pamela Still, failed to get a second on her push to rescind the deal.

Trump received just over 62% of the vote in Mount Holly Springs in the 2024 election, although local residents said there are now growing numbers of Latinos and refugees from Nepal who’ve flocked to Central Pennsylvania living in the borough that census data had reported as more than 95% white.

There is clearly considerable local support — often voiced in angry Facebook comments about “illegals” — for Day and his department’s work with ICE. “You guys are doing the right thing; don’t listen to the childless cat ladies,” borough resident Derek Scheuren told a contentious council meeting in February, as reported by PennLive. He also called undocumented truck drivers “illegal invaders” and offered to buy a beer for any officer responsible for detaining one.

That would be nearly a half-dozen six-packs, based on Day’s updated tally. We don’t know if Scheuren has made good on that, but then there’s a lot that local officials and residents don’t know. There’s been little to no information about the multiple arrests since March, and while ICE is bringing the detainees about two hours north to Moshannon Valley, next to nothing is known about their fates.

Locals like council critic Still have also pressed for answers on the carrot of federal dollars that state and local supporters of these 287(g) programs cite as a key benefit. Day only volunteered to me that in addition to federal training of all four borough officers, he has so far put in for just $1,100 in reimbursement for officers’ time on 287(g) stops. But in an email he also sent to local leaders Wednesday, which was shared with me, Day further acknowledged that Mount Holly Springs has received some $130,000 for vehicles and equipment.

The July 15 arrest of Wu, which drew the attention of the New York Times, the Guardian, and other outlets, has so far brought more questions than answers about what’s really happening with immigration arrests in Mount Holly Springs.

Day insists that Wu, making Amazon deliveries in his Toyota Camry, ran the stop sign at the bottom of steep Hill Street and nearly collided with his officer who happened to be patrolling the main drag, State Route 34. The chief said Wu exacerbated the situation by refusing to roll down the window and instead calling his lawyer — causing a commotion that attracted attention from ICE agents who happened to be in Mount Holly Springs doing truck inspections almost right across the street.

Wu disputed that account to Lancaster Online, insisting that he did stop at the intersection, then rolled a bit forward because of its poor visibility. ICE later said Wu was sent to Moshannon Valley because he’s overstayed his 2020 tourist visa, even though he has an active asylum application and a work permit. He was released on bail after two members of Congress formally complained about his detention.

Still, Wu’s arrest — along with the high number of other detentions in Mount Holly Springs — has only fueled suspicion among the program’s critics that cops are racially profiling drivers. Day has repeatedly insisted in past comments and in the Wednesday interview that undocumented truck drivers who can’t read English and don’t follow signs about restricted streets and bridges are a danger to the community.

“I don’t want to sound mean over it, you know, or that I’m not sympathetic,” Day told me. “But they can’t be driving 18,000-pound vehicles and not understand our roadway signs.”

But local critics say cops working so closely with ICE isn’t making Mount Holly Springs safer — not when immigrants are afraid to shop, landscaping crews that largely employ Latinos have seemed to vanish, and a quaint rural town that seeks outside tourists for trout fishing or bird watching starts getting a bad reputation.

“A lot of times, it is this overweight thing — going over the bridge on the Pine Street extension or something is what they get pulled over for, and you know it’s like don’t ruin somebody’s life because their truck was packed or because their GPS didn’t tell them,” said longtime local resident Jen Dieter.

The arrest surge in Mount Holly Springs seems to confirm the fears of immigration experts who’ve found in earlier iterations of the program that immigrants were less likely to call 911 for emergencies or report other crimes. Critics also believe that cops will ignore their public-safety duties to focus instead on immigration arrests, especially as the carrot of federal dollars is dangled before small departments.

“There’s plenty of evidence and data to show that 287(g) agreements undermine trust in the communities where these agreements exist and are used extensively, because the community becomes less likely to report crimes, or to report instances of domestic violence, out of fear that doing so could translate to detention and deportation,” Gupta said.

Experts also say what’s happening in Mount Holly Springs may be the future of mass deportation under the Trump regime. While high-profile, publicity-seeking operations like the ones that targeted Minnesota or Chicago are out, ICE is increasingly relying on its 287(g) partners to make arrests without attracting as much public outcry. The wave of arrests in the Pennsylvania borough came as ICE is nationally reporting as many as 1,400 immigration arrests in a day, an all-time record.

Some longtime residents of Mount Holly Springs are worried that things will never be the same.

Bear, the shop owner, spoke about moving here 25 years ago and slowly building a community around her business. “This is a small community,” she said. “We all know each other. You know these people that we’re talking about, [that] I’ve done business with. You know, hopefully we’ll do it again. But who knows?”

“But more than it being about business, it’s about community. And I think this isn’t how I would treat my neighbors.”