Author: The Inquirer Editorial Board

Immigrants in custody under the Trump administration have been denied medical care, face dangerous detention conditions, and have died in the highest numbers in two decades, according to a letter sent to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem by a group of Democratic senators.

As more and more immigrants are arrested, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement looks to vastly expand its detention capabilities — including in Pennsylvania and New Jersey — cases of abuse and death will only grow.

This is a moral wrong that violates America’s constitutional protections.

State and local leaders should vigorously push back against new detention facilities proposed by a federal government that has shown open contempt for the law in pursuit of the president’s cruel and inhumane mass deportation policies.

Contrary to what Donald Trump promised, most of the immigrants being detained are not hardened criminals or the “worst of the worst.” Fewer than 14% of people arrested by ICE in 2025 had any charges or convictions for violent offenses. Immigrants with no criminal record at all now make up the largest group in detention.

To be sure, immigration detention has a long history of abuse, with complaints about difficult living conditions, substandard medical care, and an opaque system leading to limited accountability when immigrants die in custody.

Even when changes are promised, the problem has persisted.

“Detention centers are not safe, abuses are widespread and detention facilities consistently fail to meet basic minimum standards,” wrote Mary Small, policy director for the Detention Watch Network, in 2015. “The Obama administration’s attempts at reforming the immigration detention system have failed.”

More than a decade later, that failure will likely compound as ICE, flush with $45 billion from the GOP-controlled Congress and zero accountability from the White House, ramps up not only the scale, but also the callousness of its operations.

The conditions inside detention centers are bleak, even more so for the most vulnerable populations. ProPublica recently told the stories of children being held at the ICE facility in Dilley, Texas. Their testimony is heartbreaking.

“Since I got to this Center all you will feel is sadness and mostly depression,” one child wrote. Another said that “the workers treat the residents unhumanly, verbally and I don’t want to imging how they would act if they where unsupervised.”

A 9-year-old put it plainly, writing, “I am not happy, please get me out of here.”

Governors are rightfully objecting to the growth of ICE detention centers in their states. Both Gov. Josh Shapiro and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill have taken a strong stance in opposition. Local communities and officials are also fighting back.

ICE plans to convert warehouses to detention centers in Upper Bern Township in Berks County, Tremont Township in Schuylkill County, and in Roxbury, a municipality in New Jersey’s Sussex County. Bucks County commissioners, who approved a bipartisan resolution against the detention centers, said the federal government may be looking to buy properties in Bensalem Township and Middletown Township.

Shapiro has pledged to use every tool at his disposal to block the plans in Pennsylvania. Roxbury’s mayor, Republican Shawn Potillo, has also vowed to work against the proposed facility. Sherrill has promised to explore new state taxes in her own efforts to discourage the growth of detention centers.

These statements are a step in the right direction. If officials are seeking examples of effective action, they can look to New Hampshire, where local opposition helped kill a plan for a new ICE facility, or to the small conservative town of Social Circle, Ga., which refused to turn on water access for an ICE detention center.

In a letter to Homeland Security’s Noem, Sherrill laid out the case against ICE in no uncertain terms.

“DHS’ treatment of human beings — citizen and noncitizen alike — reflects a chilling disregard for both human life and the rule of law,” Sherill wrote. “New Jersey will not be complicit in this.”

No one who values human rights should.

Donald Trump, the president of war, keeps killing people at home and abroad.

Over the weekend, Trump presided over the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader. While many Iranians celebrated the end of Ali Khamenei’s 37-year reign of terror, the reckless gambit does not hide the fact that Trump violated the Constitution (again) by going to war without consent from Congress and unleashed more chaos.

This was a war of choice by Trump, who was egged on by the bloodthirsty leaders of Israel and Saudi Arabia. The administration provided no evidence of an imminent threat from Iran.

More alarming, Trump acted with no mandate, no plan, and no idea of what comes next.

The bill is already coming due. At least six U.S. service members have been killed, and five others seriously injured. Trump blithely said more soldiers will likely die. Apparently, that’s the price of a senseless war started by an unstable leader.

Oil prices jumped, and the stock market slumped, underscoring how Trump’s latest folly will cost Americans blood and treasure.

The conflict has already spread to other countries across the Middle East, as Iran fired drones and missiles at Israel, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, Syria, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Dozens have been killed.

Israel, the U.S.’s eager bombing partner, responded with airstrikes in Lebanon that killed at least 31 people. The volatile situation risks spinning out of control.

The FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are on high alert for terror attacks.

Can either agency be trusted to keep Americans safe?

Under Trump, scores of FBI counterterrorism agents have been fired, while DHS has undergone a mass exodus. DHS has been focused on arresting immigrants, killing Americans, and trampling the Constitution, while FBI Director Kash Patel was last seen pounding beers at the Olympics.

Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, the weekend TV commentator turned unfit and unqualified defense secretary, claimed that taking out Iran’s top leaders was not about regime change.

That’s good, because the U.S. has a failed history when it comes to forcing its will on other countries, something presidents never seem to learn.

So, what is the plan? No one knows — not even Trump, whose rationale keeps shifting.

Trump urged Iranians to take control of their country. But that is impossible to do without weapons or outside support. Indeed, more than 30,000 Iranians were killed in January after they took to the streets.

Hegseth would not rule out sending American troops into Iran. That undercuts the president’s campaign promise to end costly forever wars like the ones in Vietnam — which Trump dodged — Iraq, and Afghanistan. Wars that cost thousands of lives and trillions in taxpayer dollars.

Then again, the Trump doctrine is day-to-day and subject to hourly change, fits and starts, and overnight zigzagging.

In fact, Trump now says the Iran war will go on until the U.S. achieves its objectives — whatever they are. Just last week, the president said Iran could avoid military conflict if it would end its nuclear weapons program.

Iran agreed with negotiators last week to never stockpile enriched uranium. But even as the talks showed progress, Trump decided to start bombing while he hosted a $1 million-a-ticket fundraiser at his private club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Let’s not forget Trump withdrew from a deal in 2018 that limited Iran’s nuclear enrichment and stockpiles of enriched uranium. He also claimed last year that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” after a bombing campaign by the U.S. and Israel.

Trump created all this chaos. An unserious president is leading the country into serious trouble. And the Republicans in Congress who have the power to stop him do nothing.

Killing Iran’s leader comes on the heels of Trump ordering the illegal invasion and arrest of Venezuela’s president.

That came after Trump’s illegal boat strikes in Central and South America that have killed more than 100 people without any evidence of wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to take over Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, and attack drug cartels in Mexico. He continues to diss European allies, while doing nothing to stop Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine.

Republicans who control Congress continue to defer to Trump, who is quickly turning the United States into a rogue state.

Now, with no clear exit strategy in Iran, Trump appears poised to continue to try to bomb his way to a Nobel Peace Prize, while making a mockery of America.

For one day at least, Donald Trump’s bigoted effort to whitewash history was foiled in Philadelphia.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the slavery exhibits that were removed last month from the President’s House in Independence National Historical Park.

Fittingly, the legal rebuke came during Black History Month as Trump tries to rewrite America’s history of slavery, undermine voting rights, and rollback civil rights efforts designed to live up to the Founding Fathers’ vision of a country where all are created equal.

Even better, the ruling came on Presidents Day, a federal holiday first set aside to honor George Washington, who voluntarily gave up power, unlike Trump, who was criminally indicted for trying to overturn an election he lost.

In a poetic touch that feels conjured by Octavius V. Catto or William Still, the Trump administration lost in federal court on a lawsuit brought by the City of Philadelphia, which is headed by its first African American female mayor.

The President’s House exhibit was created to recognize the enslaved people who lived in Washington’s home in Philadelphia while he was president. Like the nearby Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the President’s House is an essential part of American history.

Trump wants to airbrush the parts of American history that do not fit with his racist record and white supremacist messaging. But understanding how slavery shaped the economic, social, and political forces across the United States is crucial to addressing the systemic racism and inequality that persists today.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe called out Trump’s cruel attempt to take the country backward in unsparing terms. She began her 40-page opinion by quoting directly from 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime:

“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”

She compared the Trump administration’s claim that it can unilaterally remove exhibits it does not like to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts,” Rufe wrote. “It does not.”

Rufe, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President George W. Bush, did not buy the Trump administration’s authoritarian argument. “[T]he government claims it alone has the power to erase, alter, remove and hide historical accounts on taxpayer and local government-funded monuments within its control.”

She added: “The government here likewise asserts truth is no longer self-evident, but rather the property of the elected chief magistrate and his appointees and delegees, at his whim to be scraped clean, hidden, or overwritten. And why? Solely because, as Defendants state, it has the power.”

Rufe dismissed those claims and ordered the federal government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026,” the day before the exhibits were removed.

Initially, Rufe did not set a deadline to restore the displays. But she updated her order, requiring the exhibits to be restored by 5 p.m. Friday.

The Trump administration will likely do everything it can to drag out a resolution.

There is no time to waste in ending this racist charade.

The country is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is a national embarrassment that the President’s House exhibits are missing while the city expects 1.5 million visitors this year.

Philadelphia is the birthplace of America. It is here that the founders declared their independence from King George III. Their list of grievances against the king echoes some of Trump’s abuses.

Judge Rufe’s order struck a blow for telling the truth, something Washington would appreciate.

“It is not disputed that President Washington owned slaves,” Rufe wrote. “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery receives a false account of this country’s history.”

Somewhere, the enslaved who labored at the President’s House smiled.

Say their names: Ona Judge, Hercules Posey, Moll, Giles, Austin, Richmond, Paris, Joe Richardson, Christopher Sheels, and William Lee.

If Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and City Council needed more convincing about why Philadelphia should no longer elect a register of wills, they now have $900,000 worth of reasons.

That is the amount taxpayers have shelled out in recent years to settle lawsuits by former employees who refused to play the shopworn patronage game.

This appalling waste would not happen if the city stopped electing a register of wills.

There is no logical reason for this to be an elected position. It is a back-office function that issues marriage licenses, probates wills, and maintains records of residents who got married and died.

In most world-class cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, a clerk or court office handles these mundane tasks. But in Philadelphia, the register of wills stands as a relic from the city’s corrupt and contented era of machine politics.

The sooner the elected post goes away, the sooner Philadelphia can move into the modern era. The problem is that no elected official in a one-party town has the courage to do what is right by taxpayers and push to eliminate the so-called row offices, which include the register of wills and the sheriff, another elected post with a long history of corruption and inefficiency.

Former Mayor Michael Nutter, who served from 2008 to 2016, was one of the few elected leaders in recent times who supported eliminating the row offices. He was successful in folding the obscure Clerk of Quarter Sessions office into the Philadelphia court system, but City Council refused to eliminate the other two row offices.

In the past decade, there has been scant talk about reforming city government or increasing efficiency — even as Philadelphia’s budget ballooned by roughly 75%.

The register of wills stands as Philly’s patronage poster child.

For four decades, the office was run by Ron Donatucci and was staffed with ward leaders, committee members, friends, and family members connected to different power players in the Democratic Party.

In 2019, Donatucci was defeated by Tracey Gordon, who previously ran for City Council, city commissioner, and state representative. Things didn’t exactly improve.

Gordon lasted only one term, but left taxpayers with a trail of lawsuits by former employees who said they were pressured to donate to her campaign.

Last week, the city agreed to pay $250,000 to a former clerk who said he was fired for refusing to contribute $150 to Gordon’s campaign. Several other former employees received six-figure payments after filing similar complaints.

Gordon told The Inquirer she “did nothing wrong.”

Gordon was defeated in the 2023 Democratic primary by John Sabatina Sr., a ward leader from the Northeast. He began swapping out old patronage hires for new ones, which led to more lawsuits.

The city has paid out $256,000 in settlements to nine former register of wills employees who filed lawsuits alleging Sabatina fired them.

Five cases are still pending, which means taxpayers will keep paying.

This Editorial Board has long called for the elimination of the register of wills and the sheriff’s office, moves that would save the city tax dollars and unending embarrassment.

The Committee of Seventy and the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Agency both issued reports in 2009 calling for the elimination of row offices. (The title of one was “Needless Jobs.” The title of the other was “A history we can no longer afford: Consolidating Philadelphia’s Row Offices.”)

But until voters demand change, the inefficient patronage system will grind on.

Amid the surge in murders and shootings that plagued Philadelphia following the pandemic, City Hall directed millions of dollars to dozens of nonprofits to try to stem the violence.

But an Inquirer investigation in 2023 found the city’s $22 million anti-violence program devolved into a politicized process that steered funding to nascent nonprofits that were unprepared to manage the funds. A city controller’s report the following year backed the reporting.

Now, along comes another Inquirer investigation, this time detailing the rapid rise and financial struggles of a nonprofit that received millions in taxpayer funds from the same program.

Soon after the nonprofit New Options More Opportunities, known as NOMO, received a $1 million grant to combat gun violence in 2021, city grant managers raised red flags about the lack of financial records and controls, the recent investigation by Inquirer reporters Ryan W. Briggs and Samantha Melamed found.

The story detailed a number of issues surrounding NOMO, including multiple eviction filings, an IRS tax lien, and five lawsuits regarding unpaid rent. But even as problems mounted, money from city, state, and federal sources continued to flow.

In a lengthy statement to the Editorial Board, Rickey Duncan, NOMO’s executive director, denied any wrongdoing. He said that NOMO “faced difficulties” several years ago, but they have been addressed. He stressed that all the funds received by his organization had been properly spent.

Since 2020, NOMO has received roughly $6 million in city, state, and federal funds. Duncan’s salary has increased from $48,000 to $145,000. His profile grew, as well: In November 2023, Mayor-elect Cherelle L. Parker named Duncan, a former volunteer at NOMO before he began leading the group, to her transition team.

According to The Inquirer investigation, NOMO was one of only two organizations in 2021 to get the maximum grant of $1 million, which was roughly triple its operating budget. The report found that a nonprofit the city contracted to manage the grant program raised immediate concerns that NOMO provided no balance sheet or audited financial statement.

Over the years, NOMO expanded its gun violence prevention efforts to include youth after-school programs and a short-lived affordable housing initiative.

At one point, NOMO leased an apartment complex near Drexel University’s campus at a cost of more than $500,000 a year. But it appears no one questioned how the housing plan fit with the organization’s core anti-violence mission, according to The Inquirer report.

In fact, the city tried to give NOMO more money. Last year, the city wanted to award NOMO a $700,000 contract for homelessness prevention, but the organization couldn’t meet the conditions, so the funds were not disbursed.

In January 2025, the city drew the line when Duncan tried to get reimbursed $9,000 for season tickets to the Sixers. He said the tickets were “an innovative tool for workforce development.”

But a grant program manager responded: “Season tickets to the Sixers are not an acceptable programmatic expense.”

The entire saga may underscore the need for stronger vetting and oversight of fledgling organizations that are well-intended but lack the practical experience to manage a program entrusted with hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars.

Adam Geer, Philadelphia’s chief public safety director, stressed in an interview with the Editorial Board that the Parker administration has implemented stronger oversight and support systems that did not exist when the initial anti-violence grants began.

He said those safeguards helped flag problems and put a stop to some of the spending that concerned city officials. Geer conceded there were “growing pains” when the anti-violence program launched, but he argued that nonprofits like NOMO played a key role in the steep drop in shootings in Philadelphia.

Duncan defended his organization’s anti-violence track record.

“There’s a reason why the city has continued to support the work NOMO is doing,” he wrote. “We are having a real, positive impact on people’s lives.”

Indeed, gun violence prevention programs can work — but the organizations charged with putting them in place must have the proper screening, support, and oversight.