How A Pennsylvania County Came To Embody The Country's Immigration Divide

LANCASTER, Pa. — Jaime Arroyo was surprised. The 35-year-old councilman from this small city less than two hours outside Philly hadn’t expected this kind of response to a municipal ordinance, of all things. But the backlash to the Lancaster City Council’s Trust Act, or “welcoming city” ordinance, came on quickly and intensely.

The statute, passed in late February, codified Lancaster’s previously informal policy for cooperating with federal immigration authorities: essentially that it won’t, unless compelled to under state or federal law, which generally happens in cases of active warrants or prosecution. Practically, it means that city officials, including cops, can’t ask about a person’s immigration status or hand over information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that might lead to a deportation.

Arroyo, a Democrat, viewed the Trust Act as just another functional measure, like any other thing the city council might work on.

“At the end of the day, when you’re working in the city, you’re making sure the water turns on. Human services, things like that. So I got caught off guard by some of the responses,” Arroyo told me over Zoom last month, from a sunny office above the downtown’s multicultural farmer’s market, the kind of place where for lunch you can enjoy both an empanada and an open-face Scandinavian sandwich. The market itself underscores the diversity of Lancaster, which proudly touts itself as the nation’s “refugee capital.”

Besides being a councilman, Arroyo is the CEO of a local nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs who are women and people of color. His family, like lots of others, emigrated from Puerto Rico to Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country in the 1960s to work in farming, so he understands what it’s like