PHILADELPHIA — ICE agents have arrested nearly 20 immigrants in Norristown, Pa., during the last two weeks, according to advocates who described an aggressive and ongoing enforcement campaign in the seat of Montgomery County.

“Every day, every day,” said Denisse Agurto, executive director of Unides Para Servir Norristown. “As many as nine cars, and more Spanish-speaking officers — people who look like us and talk like us.”

The arrests in the suburban municipality, where one in three residents is Latino, come as President Donald Trump named Montgomery County to a list of so-called sanctuary jurisdictions from which he has threatened to cut federal funding.

Agurto’s organization contacted the Norristown Municipal Council for help, and families plan to address the Montgomery County commissioners on Thursday to ask that a newly hired immigration-affairs director become an active voice of support for undocumented people.

ICE officials in Philadelphia, headquarters for operations in three states including Pennsylvania, did not respond to requests for comment about the arrests.

Norristown council member William McCoy called the situation “heartbreaking and unacceptable.”

“Families are being torn apart. Fathers are being taken from their children. People who have built their lives here, who contribute to our community every single day, are living in fear,” he said in a statement. “This is not justice. This is cruelty.”

Council member Mydera Robinson also spoke out, telling families: “You are not invisible. You are not alone.”

“We are a community, and we must recognize that what impacts one of us, impacts all of us,” she said. “We are stronger together.”

Rally planned for Saturday

Activists have planned a “Montco Stands With Immigrants” rally for noon Saturday at West Marshall and George Streets in Norristown.

Meanwhile, workers in Philadelphia’s Italian Market said Wednesday that they had been warned by the Mexican consulate about imminent ICE enforcement actions. “They said businesses will be among the first to be targeted,” said an undocumented worker who declined to provide her name.

Montgomery County Commissioner Jamila Winder, a Democrat from the Norristown area, called the ICE arrests “disconcerting and saddening.”

She reiterated, though, that neither the county government nor any local jurisdiction can block ICE from enforcing federal immigration laws. The county is helping where it can, she said, including holding events to support immigrant communities.

ICE operates four detention facilities in Pennsylvania. It was unclear Wednesday evening where those arrested were being held.

Agurto said the situation in Norristown has been building across roughly the last two weeks, with the number of ICE agents and government cars increasing almost daily.

She said agents arrived at homes with no warrants, but banged so hard on doors that families were intimidated into allowing officers inside. ICE agents were looking for people outside a Latino supermarket and health clinic, she said. And at least one group of men was arrested as they gathered in hopes of getting a day’s work on a construction crew.

It’s common for undocumented immigrants seeking work to gather in a known place, often the parking lot of a Home Depot or Lowe’s store, where contractors know to go to readily find workers.

Agurto said agents were using facial-recognition software on cell phones to try to confirm people’s identities.

“They walk inside the house like it’s their house. It’s this very aggressive situation,” she said. “We’re getting people coming to our center, ‘They took my uncle, they took my brother.’”

Trump deportation pledge challenged

Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants in what he says will be the largest removal effort in American history.

Trump’s pledge is challenged, however, by math and manpower. The U.S. is home to about 13 million undocumented people, roughly the population of Pennsylvania. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement employs about 21,000 nationwide.

Montgomery County has no official sanctuary policy, but was named last week on the administration list.

The list subsequently disappeared from the internet, though federal government officials insisted it was still being used.

The Montgomery County commissioners meet 10 a.m. Thursday in Norristown, where they are certain to hear strong opinions from community members.

This year the board hired the county’s first immigrant-affairs director, Nelly Jimenez-Arevalo, to try to ensure that immigrants, regardless of legal status, feel safe in interacting with county officials and workers. Commissioners Chair Neil Makhija, a Democrat, said earlier that he wanted to ensure that undocumented immigrants were comfortable, for instance, in reporting crimes or seeking protection-from-abuse orders.

Since starting her job in mid-March, Jimenez-Arevalo has worked to determine whether the county is doing all it can to serve immigrant communities and to ensure that departments have multilingual resources. She has also conducted outreach within immigrant communities to determine their needs.

For months immigrant-rights activists have pushed the commissioners to adopt a formal “welcoming-county” policy that would limit the county’s cooperation with ICE, especially on criminal-justice matters. Board members have argued they lack the power to do so.

Recently, for the second time since Trump took office, the administration shook up the top leadership of ICE as it demands more immigration arrests and deportations.

The agency announced that Kenneth Genalo, who headed the enforcement and removal division, will retire, and Robert Hammer, the head of ICE’s investigative arm, will be reassigned. In February, the Trump administration replaced the then-acting ICE director, Caleb Vitello.

The group Unides Para Servir Norristown is a grassroots advocate for the Latino community.

It has issued an alert on its Facebook page about ongoing ICE arrests, and plans to hold a meeting for allies on Friday. It wants to establish a communications network that can transmit real-time information about ICE enforcement activities.

The organization said it had received recent reports of ICE operating in other regional jurisdictions, including Ambler, Phoenixville, and Lansdale.

Norristown is a community of about 36,000 people, set on the Schuylkill about 15 miles from Philadelphia. Its population is 33% Latino, 32% Black, 26% white, and 2% Asian. About 18% of its residents were born outside the United States.

Figures on its undocumented population were not immediately available.

Winder, the county commissioner, has described the county as “walking a tightrope” on immigration.

Immigrants, she said Wednesday, are essential to the fabric of the community and need to be protected. But Montgomery County depends on federal dollars, and the Department of Homeland Security threatened that funding last week when releasing its sanctuary-city list.

In the last six months, Winder said, Montgomery County has taken several steps to support immigrant communities. At the same time, she worried a welcoming-county ordinance would give false hope to immigrants, since local governments within the county may still collaborate with ICE.

“There are things I can do and there are things I absolutely cannot help with,” Winder said. “That for me is disheartening. If I did have some control and some influence, maybe things would look different. But it’s just the reality of our office.”

_____

(Staff writer Michelle Myers and graphics editor John Duchneskie contributed to this article.)

_____

©2025 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.