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  • Josh Shapiro visits the White House as Mikie Sherrill skips governors meeting after clash with Donald Trump over Democrats’ attendance

    Josh Shapiro visits the White House as Mikie Sherrill skips governors meeting after clash with Donald Trump over Democrats’ attendance

    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro joined President Donald Trump at the White House for a breakfast on Friday, following weeks of uncertainty and strife over whether any Democrats would attend the traditionally bipartisan annual event after Trump reversed course on a decision to disinvite two other blue-state governors from the meeting.

    A spokesperson for Shapiro said he decided to attend the meeting at the White House once Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis were invited, despite Trump previously declaring the pair of Democratic leaders were not welcome.

    “Gov. Shapiro chose to join his colleagues and go to the White House to raise real issues and harm the Trump administration is doing to Pennsylvania,” Rosie Lapowsky, Shapiro’s press secretary, said in a statement.

    Trump initially planned to invite only Republican governors to the annual event that coincides with the National Governors Association winter meeting in Washington, D.C., but faced pushback by the group’s GOP chair. Trump then invited Democrats, as well, but rescinded the invitations for Moore and Polis. In a post on his Truth Social platform earlier this month, Trump wrote that the two Democratic governors were “not worthy of being there.”

    The weekslong back-and-forth threatened the nonpartisan nature of the National Governors Association that represents 55 governors, including those from all 50 states and five U.S. territories. Ultimately, the NGA declined to facilitate the annual breakfast event, and Trump later re-invited Polis and Moore.

    Josh Shapiro won’t attend any events with Trump that exclude fellow governors
    President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a breakfast with the National Governors Association in the State Dining Room of the White House, Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

    Moore, Polis, and Shapiro were among the more than two dozen governors who attended the White House breakfast Friday, where Trump delivered brief remarks. Other Democrats, including New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherill, decided against going.

    Sherrill, a former member of Congress who just began her term last month, said in a statement that she opted to skip the White House breakfast to “focus on other NGA meetings.”

    “The president’s chaotic back-and-forth about the NGA was counterproductive and Gov. Sherrill decided not to attend,” said Sean Higgins, a spokesperson for Sherrill.

    What Shapiro talked about

    Shapiro described the closed-door meeting between Trump, the governors, and all of Trump’s cabinet as productive for him to advocate for specific issues directly with federal leaders.

    “Folks were respectful to me,” Shapiro told reporters following the meeting. “I went there with a mission to talk about things that were important to Pennsylvania.”

    Shapiro, who is currently running for reelection and touts his ability to work across partisan lines, has expressed an openness to working with Trump on issues specific to Pennsylvania, though he has challenged the president more than a dozen times in court since Trump took office last year.

    Shapiro said he was able to discuss his top issues directly with federal officials. He said he spoke with U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins about the reemergence of the avian flu in Pennsylvania; discussed releasing withheld broadband funding with Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick about releasing withheld broadband funding; and talked with U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought about the ways “their policies are hurting rural Pennsylvanians.”

    New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, another Democrat who attended the meeting, said afterward in a news conference that she was glad to hear what lessons Trump said he learned from his administration’s immigration enforcement mission in Minneapolis that led to mass protests and the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents.

    Hochul said Trump told the group that “we’ll only go where we’re wanted,” alleviating concerns among some Democratic governors that their states may be the next to see a full-scale federal presence upending daily life.

    Weeks of back-and-forth ahead of the White House breakfast

    Sherrill and Shapiro were among the 18 Democratic governors who earlier said they would not attend the event if their colleagues were excluded.

    “Democratic governors have a long record of working across the aisle to deliver results and we remain committed to this effort,” they said in a joint statement on Feb. 10 through the Democratic Governors Association. “But it’s disappointing this administration doesn’t seem to share the same goal. At every turn, President Trump is creating chaos and division, and it is the American people who are hurting as a result.”

    They added: “Democratic governors remain united and will never stop fighting to protect and make life better for people in our states.”

    In comments to CNN last week, Sherrill said that “worse decisions” would be made without all the governors there.

    “For the president to pick and choose who he is going to have to sort of undermine the very focus of this, of coming together to get stuff done for the country just seeds more … chaos,” the New Jersey Democrat said.

    Gov. Mikie Sherrill, shown here at a news conference as volunteers gather prior to shoveling snow at Fairview Village on Martin Luther King Day during a day of service, in Camden, New Jersey, January 19, 2026.

    Moore, the nation’s only Black governor, and Polis, the first openly gay man elected to U.S. governor, were the only two leaders Trump singled out, raising concerns by civil rights groups.

    Trump, however, cited different reasons for his objections to Moore and Polis’ attendance. He said he wanted to exclude Polis because his state continues to incarcerate a former county clerk over her conviction related to allowing election-denier activists access to election data following the 2020 election. Trump also expressed a number of grievances toward Moore, including his handling of the rebuilding of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and Baltimore’s crime rates.

    Following the meeting Friday, governors from both parties reaffirmed that they were still committed to working with Trump despite the turmoil.

    “It’s really important imagery that we stand together as governors of our states and represent all of America, and just remind people that there’s really more that brings us together and unites us than divides us,” said Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who chairs the NGA.

    Shapiro separately told reporters that he has worked with directly Trump to “save steelworker jobs” but remains ready to challenge them in court if they threaten Pennsylvanians’ rights.

    Asked whether he has a good relationship with Trump, Shapiro said: “We have a relationship where we can work for the people of Pennsylvania, that’s my job.”

  • Philly-area lawmakers applaud Supreme Court striking down Trump’s tariffs as area businesses brace for uncertainty on refunds

    Philly-area lawmakers applaud Supreme Court striking down Trump’s tariffs as area businesses brace for uncertainty on refunds

    Pennsylvania lawmakers say Congress should reclaim its power over taxes and tariffs after the U.S. Supreme Court quashed President Donald Trump’s controversial global tariffs.

    The nation’s high court ruled 6-3 Friday that Trump overstepped with tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, dealing a significant blow to the president’s economic agenda and reasserting congressional authority.

    Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — both Trump nominees — joined liberal justices in the majority. Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented.

    Trump told reporters at the White House Friday that he was “ashamed” of the three Republican-appointed justices for not having “the courage to do what’s right for our country.”

    But local lawmakers celebrated the decision as a step toward alleviating inflation exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs.

    It’s “​​the first piece of good news that American consumers have gotten in a very long time,” said U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Philadelphia), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

    The decision is unlikely to be the end of the road for Trump’s efforts to impose tariffs. The court struck down the broad authority Trump had claimed to impose sweeping tariffs, but he could still impose additional import and export taxes using powers he employed in his first term.

    Friday’s decision centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law, including the “reciprocal” tariffs he waged on other countries, The Associated Press reported.

    What’s next

    It remains unclear what will happen to tariff revenue that’s already been collected — about $30 billion a month since Trump took office last year, NPR reported. But Pennsylvania lawmakers are pushing for Congress to reassert its power to control the country’s purse strings.

    “As the Supreme Court validated this morning, Congress has the authority to levy taxes and tariffs,” Boyle said. “It’s time now for us to finally reclaim that authority and bring some certainty and rationality to our tariff policy, which under Donald Trump has been all over the map and changes day by day, even hour by hour.”

    Casey-Lee Waldron, a spokesperson for U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks), said in a statement Friday that the lawmaker “applauds” the high court’s decision, “which validates the Congressman’s opposition to blanket and indiscriminate tariffs that are not narrowly tailored, and that do not lower costs for the American consumer.”

    Waldron added that Fitzpatrick supports enforcing trade laws, but “this should always be done in a collaborative manner with a bipartisan, bicameral majority in Congress.”

    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and N.J. Gov. Mikie Sherrill, both Democrats, celebrated the decision Friday in statements that noted the challenges the tariffs had caused for local economies.

    Speaking to reporters at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington, Shapiro said tariffs had done real harm to Pennsylvanians, citing rising prices for farmers and for consumer goods.

    “There is a direct line connecting those price increases to the president pushing the tariff button,” Shapiro said. “I think the Supreme Court got it right, and I say that as a former attorney general, and I say that as someone who actually follows the law.”

    U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.), however, came to the defense of Trump’s tariff policies, saying in a statement that he believes Trump “was using legitimate emergency authorities very effectively to protect our national security and achieve fair trade for U.S. companies and American workers.”

    McCormick, a former Treasury official and former hedge fund executive, said he was disappointed with the court’s ruling and called to find other ways to accomplish Trump’s economic and national security goals, which include preventing “foreign competitors from cheating Pennsylvania workers.”

    Shockwaves in Philly and beyond

    Trump enacted the sweeping tariffs early last year, arguing that the move would incentivize companies to bring operations back to the United States and even trade deficits with other countries.

    The move, however, sent shock waves through the U.S. economy as prices increased and U.S. exports, including Pennsylvania’s lumber sales, suffered.

    Tariffs slowed business at the Port of Philadelphia, which reported cargo volume down across the board.

    Philly is a major gateway for produce, bringing in more fresh fruit than any other U.S. port, largely from Central and South America. The port saw record container volume last year, handling almost 900,000 units, up 6% over 2024. About two-thirds of that cargo was refrigerated — fruit and meat, for example.

    But this year got off to a slow start. “The story is increased competition and tariffs,” Sean Mahoney, marketing director at the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority (PhilaPort), said during the agency’s board meeting on Wednesday.

    Leo Holt, president of the city’s primary terminal operator Holt Logistics, hopes companies that see savings would pass them on to consumers. In practice, he acknowledged many would likely take a conservative approach.

    “I think consumers are going to demand that at least there’s an accounting for what they’re paying,” Holt said Friday.

    U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.) said in a statement that he knows many Republican colleagues of his “are privately breathing sighs of relief this morning at the court’s decision.”

    “They should instead be asking themselves why they didn’t use their legislative authority to do more to stop these tariffs when they had the chance — and what they’ll do differently next time when President Trump inevitably tries again,” Coons said.

    ‘Nobody is going to rush to drop their prices’

    The Supreme Court’s ruling will be welcome news for some businesses, but it also sparks uncertainty.

    Not all of Trump’s tariff increases came through the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and therefore some will remain in place, said Julie Park, a partner at London-based tax and business advisory firm Blick Rothenberg.

    “This decision brings further uncertainty for businesses,” she said in a statement. That’s in part because Trump could seek to reimpose tariffs through other legal tools, leaving “businesses in limbo about if they will get refunded.”

    U.S. exporters will also be closely following what happens next, since the fate of Trump’s tariffs will likely determine whether other countries, like Canada, keep their retaliatory measures in place. Canada is Pennsylvania’s biggest export market, with the state sending more than $14 billion in goods there in 2024. Top exports included machinery, cocoa, iron, and steel.

    Pennsylvania’s dairy industry has also been caught in the middle of the global trade war, as China and Canada imposed extra taxes on those goods in response to U.S. tariffs.

    It’s also unclear whether companies will receive refunds for the tariffs they’ve paid in the past year.

    Tim Avanzato, vice president of international sales at Lanca Sales Inc, said his New Jersey-based import-export company should be eligible for as much as $4 million in tariff refunds.

    “It’s going to create a paperwork nightmare for importers,” he said, noting that he doesn’t expect the Trump administration to make it easy to retrieve this money.

    Avanzato said he is also watching for ways the administration may implement new tariffs. Consumers, he said, shouldn’t expect changes in the immediate term.

    “Companies are not very good at passing on savings,” Avanzato said. “Nobody is going to rush to drop their prices.”

    Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.) said Trump cost Americans “a lot of money.”

    “Trump 2.0: You pay for his tariffs, tax breaks for his billionaire donors, & insane corruption for his friends and family,” the South Jersey Democrat added in a social media post.

    The Supreme Court’s decision is “a step” in righting wrongs by the Trump administration, he said, but there’s “so much more to go.”

    Staff Writers Katie Bernard, Max Marin, Aliya Schneider and Rob Tornoe and The Associated Press contributed to this article.

  • Pa. and N.J. call it gambling. Trump calls it finance. A high-stakes fight over prediction markets is underway

    Pa. and N.J. call it gambling. Trump calls it finance. A high-stakes fight over prediction markets is underway

    A high-stakes fight is brewing between President Donald Trump’s administration and states such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey over the regulation of prediction markets, the online platforms that allow users to wager on everything from sports and elections to the weather.

    States that have legalized sports betting in recent years say prediction markets amount to unauthorized gambling, putting consumers at risk and threatening tax revenues generated by regulated entities like casinos.

    But the Trump administration this week said the federal government was the appropriate regulator, siding with the industry’s argument that the markets’ “event contracts” are financial derivatives that allow investors to hedge against risks.

    The chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday said the CFTC had filed a brief in federal court to “defend its exclusive jurisdiction” to oversee these markets, amid litigation between state governments and platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket.

    Prediction markets “provide useful functions for society by allowing everyday Americans to hedge commercial risks like increases in temperature and energy price spikes,” CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said in a video posted on X.

    New Jersey collected more than $880 million in gaming tax revenues last year, while Pennsylvania brought in almost $3 billion, according to regulators. The revenues fund property tax relief programs and the horse racing industry, as well as programs for senior citizens and disabled residents.

    Pennsylvania’s gaming regulator has previously warned that prediction markets risk “creating a backdoor to legalized sports betting,” without strict oversight.

    The state Gaming Control Board’s Office of Chief Counsel told The Inquirer Wednesday that it sees a distinction between certain futures markets — like those for agricultural commodities, which have long been regulated by the CFTC — and “event contracts” tied to “the outcome of a random Wednesday night NBA basketball game.”

    Representatives for Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, both Democrats, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

    But former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — a Republican who worked to legalize sports betting while in office and who’s now advising the American Gaming Association — said Tuesday on X that the Trump administration is trying to “grow the size of the federal government & their own power while trying to crush states rights and take advantage of our citizens.”

    Beyond the courts, the GOP-led Congress could also choose to step in. Some Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns about a “Wild West” in prediction markets, notwithstanding Trump’s support for the industry.

    Sen. Dave McCormick (R., Pa.) welcomed the CFTC’s announcement, writing on X that prediction markets “offer tremendous benefits to consumers and businesses.”

    “A consistent, uniform framework for derivatives is essential to supporting U.S. markets,” he said.

    The CFTC’s action means the federal government is backing an industry in which the Trump family has a financial stake. The agency’s brief supports Crypto.com, a platform that last year partnered with the Trump family’s social media company to launch a prediction market.

    Ethics experts have said the Trump family’s ties to Crypto.com create a conflict of interest. The White House denies that and says the president’s holdings are in a trust controlled by his children.

    Winding through courts

    The U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law that prohibited sports betting in most states, paving the way for states to legalize it. Pennsylvania and New Jersey both enacted laws authorizing sports gambling and imposing requirements on betting operators such as taxation on gaming revenues, consumer protection rules, and licensing fees.

    Despite state laws, prediction markets now operate nationwide — even in states that prohibit gambling altogether, like Utah.

    New York-based Kalshi launched its platform in 2021. The CFTC initially opposed Kalshi’s election-related contracts, but in the fall of 2024 the company won a case in which courts found the regulator failed to show how the platform’s “event contracts” would harm the public interest. Kalshi users proceeded to trade more than $500 million on the “Who will win the Presidential Election?” market.

    Then came sports contracts. In January 2025, following the CFTC’s protocols, Kalshi “self-certified” that its contracts tied to the outcome of sports games complied with relevant laws.

    The company has since offered event contracts on everything from the Super Bowl to Olympic Male Curling. Some established sportsbooks like Fanatics and DraftKings have also jumped into prediction markets.

    About 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume is tied to sports, the Associated Press reported.

    States have tried to intervene. In March, New Jersey’s gaming regulator ordered Kalshi to cease and desist operations in the Garden State, alleging the company issued unauthorized sports wagers in violation of the law and state Constitution.

    Kalshi filed a lawsuit, and a federal court issued an injunction prohibiting New Jersey from pursuing enforcement actions. Kalshi and other platforms have filed suits against other states, and courts have issued conflicting rulings.

    The CFTC said it filed a brief in one such suit this week.

    “To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear: we’ll see you in court,” Selig, the Trump-appointed CFTC chairman, said Tuesday.

    It could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Advertisements by the company Kalshi predict a victory for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election before the votes are counted and polls close, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York.

    ‘Event contracts’

    At issue is whether the “event contracts” offered by prediction markets amount to gambling — regulated by states — or, as Selig says, financial instruments “that allow two parties to speculate on future market conditions without owning the underlying asset.”

    Platforms like Kalshi say they are similar to stock exchanges, where people on both sides of a trade can meet — and therefore subject to federal regulation of commodities. Unlike a casino, the platforms say, they don’t win when customers lose.

    Pennsylvania regulators see it differently.

    The state Gaming Control Board told The Inquirer Wednesday that it takes issue with “‘prediction markets’ allowing any consumer, age 18 years old or older, to purchase a ‘contract’ on any potential future event occurring, even when that event does not have any broad economic impact or consequence, such as the outcome of a random Wednesday night NBA basketball game.”

    (Under Pennsylvania law, gambling is limited to those who are 21 or older.)

    “The Board believes that is not what the Commodities Exchange Act contemplated when it was enacted by Congress and established the CFTC and is, in fact, gambling,” the board’s Office of Chief Counsel said in a statement.

    If the courts side with the Trump administration, states worry that tax revenues from regulated sportsbooks would fall and customers would be vulnerable to markets they say are easily exploited by insiders.

    “If prediction markets successfully carve themselves out of the ‘gaming’ definition, they risk creating a parallel wagering ecosystem where bets on sports outcomes occur with significantly less oversight regarding potential match-fixing,” Kevin F. O’Toole, executive director of the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, wrote in an October letter to the state’s congressional delegation.

    For example, the gaming board has the ability to penalize licensed operators if they violate state regulations, O’Toole wrote, “something that an operator who ‘self-certifies’ their contracts/wagers [under CFTC rules] would never be subjected to.”

    O’Toole said the board’s regulatory role in this area is limited to sports wagering, but he added that markets on non-sports related events — he cited examples from Polymarket such as whether there will be a civil war in the United States this year — are equally “if not more troubling.”

    The CFTC says it is capable of overseeing the industry. “America is home to the most liquid and vibrant financial markets in the world because our regulators take seriously their obligation to police fraud and institute appropriate investor safeguards,” Selig wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece this week.

  • Is AI’s authoritarianism a bigger threat than Trump’s?

    Is AI’s authoritarianism a bigger threat than Trump’s?

    Like every other beleaguered top editor in a big-city newsroom these days, Chris Quinn — who leads Cleveland.com and the print Plain Dealer — has to deal with assaults from all sides.

    In March 2024, Quinn briefly became a darling of the online left (not easy for a journalist to pull off these days) with a bold manifesto for how Cleveland.com would deal with one of those many threats: An authoritarian president who despises a free press.

    “We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information,” Quinn wrote that fateful spring in his “Letter From the Editor” column. “The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.”

    Less than two years later, Quinn has gone viral again. But this time, instead of resisting a powerful force aiming to upend American life as we’ve known it, he’s embracing one: The power of artificial intelligence to transform the workplace … and just about everything else.

    Quinn has said that steep job cuts (more on those later) have left just a skeleton crew covering Cleveland’s far-flung exurban counties, and using an AI tool to write stories based on the downsized staff’s reporting will result in more articles about these potential news deserts. When an anonymous college journalism student withdrew her application to Cleveland.com because she said she couldn’t work in a newsroom using AI to perform what was once a human task, the editor went off in his column.

    “Journalism programs are decades behind,” wrote Quinn in arguing that technology is rendering such degrees as worthless. “Many graduating students have unrealistic expectations. They imagine themselves as long-form magazine storytellers, chasing a romanticized version of journalism that largely never existed.”

    Seriously, how dare those young whippersnappers dream of creating beauty in their lives, instead of welcoming their new robot overlords and embracing their future as a cog in a faceless news machine?

    But the dilemma facing Cleveland, Quinn, and the Unknown Job Applicant is the crisis that’s been thrust in the face of all Americans as the brutal winter of 2026 slowly melts into spring, and, it seems, a reality we’re truly not ready to confront — not practically, nor politically, nor morally.

    People forget, but there was a brief moment in the mid-to-late 1990s when the internet was dismissed as a fad — clunky to use (remember dial-up?) and its abilities overhyped by Silicon Valley. But the internet radically changed how we live, as did the arrival of smartphones in the 2000s — not always for good. Yet, these seem like the warm-up acts for the life-altering conniptions caused by omnipresent AI.

    Suddenly, there’s been a flood of essays trying to warn us that whatever one initially thought about programs like ChatGPT — and, yes, AI is still prone to “hallucinations” and other embarrassing errors — we need to adjust to the news that a new generation of AI tools is much more powerful, and better poised to replace many jobs.

    “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job,” an AI executive named Matt Shumer wrote in the most viral of these hot takes, titled “Something Big Is Happening.”

    In describing how new AI programs rolled out by Anthropic, maker of Claude, and ChatGPT’s parent OpenAI can now perform complex coding tasks from the most simple instructions, Shumer warned the earthquake is coming to “[l]aw, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less.”

    This jibes with dire predictions from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who has warned repeatedly of “painful” white-collar job losses caused by AI, and said in his most recent long-form essay that the new technologies are “acting as a ‘general labor substitute for humans.’”

    Is that bad? It sounds bad.

    In 2026, America needs an anti-AI party | Will Bunch Newsletter

    The sweeping changes in the labor market are already starting, including a sharp drop in entry-level hiring for coders, who seem to be the canaries in this coal mine. January was the worst month for layoffs since the Great Recession of 2009, and analysts say job losses directly attributable to replacement by AI were a significant slice of that. The idea that wiping out millions of jobs might be bad for the overall economy even caught the ADD-addled attention of Wall Street for a day or two.

    I don’t have space here to go deep on the technology, but everyone should take a moment to learn what “vibe coding” and “agentic AI” are, and read the New Yorker on the rise of Anthropic’s Claude, or listen to a really good podcast explanation of AI and the labor market from the New York Times’ Kevin Roose. But we’re already overdue in addressing what this all means for everyday human existence.

    The idea that eventually “everything you think, do, and say is in the pill you took today” — as Zager and Evans sang so presciently in their 1969 No. 1 smash, “In the Year 2525” — has been with us for decades. But there was also a sense that robots performing the worst drudgery of the workplace might be liberating, creating more leisure time and space for human creativity.

    So far, that’s not what’s happening. Avoiding the poverty and deprivation that would be caused by massive job losses would require a government willing to pay people a universal basic income (UBI), but the current government has instead been dismantling the existing welfare state. And the workers creating AI are sleeping in their cubicles.

    And creativity may become a fever dream, not just for that naive journalism student with her “romanticized” visions of telling stories. Did you read the Times profile of the romance novelist who’s relying on Claude to crank out new tomes in as little as 45 minutes? Did you watch the lifelike short movie of an AI-generated “Brad Pitt” fighting “Tom Cruise”?

    Let me get this straight. AI is taking our jobs and ending artistic struggle to liberate us … for what, exactly?

    I haven’t even discussed the other really bad things about AI, including the drain on electricity from massive data centers likely to unleash yet another form of tyranny, unbridled climate change, and the death of critical thinking as reliance on AI decimates the classroom. At a moment when we’re just coming to terms with the downside of smartphones — such as higher rates of anxiety and depression among teenagers — could we learn to avoid similar mistakes with AI before they start?

    And did I mention the whole “robots take over the world” scenario?

    Dealing with all this would take political will. Yet, leaders in both parties — Trump, for sure, but also top Democrats like Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom — have embraced the data center and AI ambitions of their donor class, even though the majority of their voters want strict regulation. A pro-AI super-PAC raised $125 million last year to buy the midterm elections. Who is fighting for the about-to-be-starving artists?

    People opposed to a data center proposal at the former Pennhurst state hospital grounds talk during a break in an East Vincent Township supervisors meeting in December in Spring City, Pa.

    It doesn’t have to be like this. The same better-late-than-never push to remove smartphones from classrooms can be used as a model for eradicating AI in K-12 schools as well as college, to give the next generation at least a fighting chance to learn to think for itself. The politicians don’t have to allow data centers that burn fossil fuels instead of clean energy and consume the lion’s share of water available to the communities where they’re located.

    Nor do we need to embrace the late-stage capitalist ethos that if shareholders make more money employing robots than human beings, some invisible law forces us to do this. Remember Chris Quinn back in Cleveland? The reason he feels he needs AI to write up the news is because, back in 2019, he oversaw the layoff of one-third of his unionized newsroom, at the behest of the paper’s corporate parent.

    Maybe robots are now “agentic,” but humans have always had agency. Here’s the perfect chance to use it: by encouraging the uses of AI that will be good for society — diagnosing sick patients and inventing medicines to cure them, for example — but regulating or banning the aspects of AI that will make life worse.

    That’s partly up to the politicians, but it’s also up to us. Societal trends like the outbreak of “neighborism” — strangers forming new community bonds to beat back the fascism of immigration raids — or a rise in union membership are healthy signs that Americans are finally getting tired of technology driving us apart.

    The fight against the authoritarianism of unchecked and often unwanted AI is the battle of the 21st century that will be waged long after the fight against political authoritarianism in Trump’s United States and elsewhere has been won.

  • Bucks commissioners vote to oppose ICE facilities, say feds looked at two local sites

    Bucks commissioners vote to oppose ICE facilities, say feds looked at two local sites

    The contentious national discussion over the rapid expansion of ICE came to the doorstep of the Philadelphia region on Wednesday, as the Bucks County commissioners voted to oppose having any processing or detention facilities in the county.

    Commissioners said they learned that the federal government had recently approached warehouse owners in two communities, Bensalem Township and Middletown Township, about possible conversions. Neither owner is going forward, they said.

    The commissioners voted 3-0 ― including the board’s lone Republican ― to approve a resolution that said such a center would be harmful for county residents and the people who would be confined there.

    ICE officials did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

    The commissioners voted a day after U.S. Rep Brian Fitzpatrick said that he would oppose such a facility ― and that he had received federal assurances none was planned in his district, which covers Bucks County and parts of eastern Montgomery County.

    Fitzpatrick, a Republican who is seeking reelection in the purple district, faces a likely November challenge from Democratic Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, who also opposes ICE sites.

    In Doylestown on Wednesday, Commissioner Gene DiGirolamo, a Republican who serves with two Democrats, said he heard about the federal interest in two local sites and strongly disapproved.

    Jake Didinsky of Southampton, said he opposes ICE warehouses in his county, comparing them to Japanese interment camps.

    “Bucks County is not a county that needs or wants a detention facility,” he said.

    Harvie, the board’s vice chair, said Bucks County “is no place for these kinds of facilities” and cautioned: “We have been down this road before, with Japanese Americans. And with Italian Americans.”

    During World War II the U.S. government forcibly incarcerated thousands of people of Japanese descent, holding them in concentration camps mostly in the western part of the country. About two-thirds of those confined were American citizens.

    Some Italian Americans endured the same treatment.

    A resolution conveys the opinion and wishes of the board, but holds no force of law.

    The Bucks resolution said the county opposes “the use of warehouses or similar industrial facilities not intended for human occupancy as facilities to hold, jail, detain, house or otherwise store human beings.”

    In addition to humanitarian concerns, the resolution says, “such facilities, being hastily erected in areas and structures not intended for human occupation, would place unanticipated demands upon water and sewer systems, creating hazards to public health, as well as heaping new strain upon public safety services.”

    The vote came as the growth of ICE leasing and purchases has become contentious in Pennsylvania and across the United States.

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expects to spend $38.3 billion to acquire warehouses around the country and retrofit them into immigrant detention centers to hold tens of thousands of people, the Washington Post reported. The newspaper analyzed agency documents that were provided to New Hampshire’s governor and published on the state’s website.

    ICE intends to buy and convert 16 buildings to serve as regional processing centers, each holding 1,000 to 1,500 immigrant detainees. An additional eight detention centers would hold 7,000 to 10,000 detainees and serve as primary sites for deportations.

    Two sites have been purchased in Pennsylvania ― one in Upper Bern Township, in northern Berks County, and another in Tremont Township, in Schuylkill County, where the purchase has drawn the ire of concerned residents.

    Last week Gov. Josh Shapiro formally asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a letter to reconsider the conversion of the Berks and Schuylkill sites, citing “real harms” to the communities.

    He questioned the legality of the facilities and hinted at a possible lawsuit, saying if DHS goes forward, his administration will “aggressively pursue every option to prevent these facilities from opening.”

    DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the plans for the Pennsylvania sites, saying that they would undergo community-impact studies and a rigorous due-diligence process, and that they would bring 11,000 jobs to the two Pennsylvania communities.

    The two sites would hold a combined 9,000 people.

    On Tuesday, Fitzpatrick’s office said it had received assurances from DHS and ICE that they had no plans or intention to open a detention facility within the First Congressional District.

    “After hearing from concerned residents, our office immediately contacted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and we have received assurances that no such facility is planned,” Fitzpatrick said.

  • Johnson & Johnson will spend $1 billion on a cell therapy plant in Montgomery County

    Johnson & Johnson will spend $1 billion on a cell therapy plant in Montgomery County

    Johnson & Johnson plans to spend more than $1 billion to build a cell therapy manufacturing facility in Montgomery County near Spring House, the New Jersey pharmaceutical and medical supplies giant said Wednesday.

    The Lower Gwynedd Township plant, part of an effort by the company to invest $55 million in the U.S. by early 2029, is expected to employ 500 people when fully operational in 2031, J&J said.

    The facility at 1201 Sumneytown Pike will add to J&J’s capacity to make cell therapy treatments for cancer, with a focus on multiple myeloma. That’s a type of cancer that attacks white blood cells in the bone marrow. Cell therapy is the use of engineered immune cells to treat disease.

    “Pennsylvania’s proud manufacturing legacy, from steel to today’s medicines and medical technologies and Johnson & Johnson’s roots here for seven decades, are part of why we are investing here.” Joaquin Duato, J&J’s chairman and CEO, said.

    Duato spoke during an event at the company’s Spring House research and development campus, where 2,500 scientists work in 70 laboratories. The Montgomery County site is J&J’s largest R&D center and it’s “where most of our discovery efforts start,” Duato said.

    The company based in New Brunswick, N.J., employs 5,885 people at 10 Pennsylvania facilities, according to the office of Gov. Josh Shapiro. The Shapiro administration has offered $41.5 million in state support for the J&J project.

    “With this investment, we are further cementing our place as a leader in life sciences,” Shapiro said. He said his administration’s efforts to cut red tape are among the reasons companies like J&J “are choosing to double down on their investments” in Pennsylvania.

    Eli Lilly & Co. last month announced plans to build a $3.5 billion pharmaceutical plant in the Lehigh Valley to expand manufacturing capacity for next-generation injectable weight-loss medicines.

    GSK said in September that it will build a biologics factory in Upper Merion Township, but did not specify how much it would spend there. That project is part of GSK’s plan to spend $1.2 billion on advanced manufacturing facilities.

    Johnson & Johnson chairman and CEO Joaquin Duato (left), was joined by Gov. Josh Shapiro and Pa. Dept. of Community and Economic Development Secretary Rick Siger (right) on Wednesday when J&J announced it will spend $1 billion on a cell therapy plant on its campus in Lower Gwynedd Township.

    Merck, another New Jersey-based drug giant, last year announced plans for a $1 billion factory and lab near Wilmington. Merck also has major operations in Montgomery County, which is among the top-ranked counties nationally for pharmaceutical manufacturing jobs.

    J&J has a long legacy in the Philadelphia region. Among its major acquisitions here was the 1959 purchase of McNeil Laboratories, which later developed Tylenol. The pain reliever is still made at a plant in Fort Washington.

    Other major Philadelphia-area J&J deals include the 1999 purchase of Centocor, one of the country’s first biotech companies, and the 2012 deal for Synthes Inc., a Swiss medical device maker with its North American headquarters and major operations here.

    Separately from the new cell therapy manufacturing facility, J&J has two expansion projects planned for the Spring House R&D site.

    One is a new cell engineering and analytical sciences facility. The other is focused on CAR-T testing and manufacturing during research and development, with the goal of creating personalized therapies more quickly and efficiently. The company did not disclose the cost of those projects.

  • Sen. Dave McCormick says Chester County proves the need for national election rules. But the GOP proposal wouldn’t have solved the county’s problems.

    Sen. Dave McCormick says Chester County proves the need for national election rules. But the GOP proposal wouldn’t have solved the county’s problems.

    When Sen. Dave McCormick stood on the Senate floor to call for nationwide rules mandating proof of citizenship and photo identification for voters, he invoked a drama that had played out three months earlier in Chester County.

    The county had mistakenly left all third-party and unaffiliated voters off the Election Day voter rolls, creating a chaotic scene in which more than 12,000 voters were forced to cast provisional ballots, which take more time to count as officials must verify the eligibility of each voter. A subsequent investigation by a law firm hired by the county attributed the issue to human error and insufficient oversight.

    “Every time Americans hear about election problems like Chester County’s, they rightly question the integrity of our electoral process,” McCormick said.

    But in his recounting of events, the Pennsylvania Republican gave incomplete and inaccurate information about Chester County’s election error.

    What did McCormick say about Chester County?

    Americans, he said, overwhelmingly believe there are problems with U.S. elections, and he argued that has been demonstrated for them on multiple occasions, including in November when Chester County omitted more than 70,000 third-party and unaffiliated voters from its Election Day pollbooks.

    “Registered voters were turned away at the polls. And an unknown number of unverified voters cast regular ballots,” McCormick claimed.

    But there is no evidence that voters were turned away or that ineligible voters cast ballots. McCormick’s office did not respond to questions.

    Were voters turned away?

    According to county officials, no voter who wanted to vote was turned away.

    Instead, for most of the day voters were offered the opportunity to vote by provisional ballot while county and state officials worked to get supplemental pollbooks distributed to polling places across the county.

    Some voters did testify at county election board meetings that they voluntarily left their polling place when their name was not in the pollbook but that they returned later in the day when they could vote on machines.

    Did unverified voters cast ballots?

    There is no evidence that ineligible voters cast ballots. The identity and eligibility of all voters who cast ballots were verified, county officials said.

    When the pollbook issue was discovered on Election Day, Chester County officials initially recommended that poll workers ask voters not included in the pollbook to sign the pollbook manually and vote as normal, according to the independent investigation of the incident.

    To ensure those voters were eligible to vote, county officials said, poll workers were instructed to follow a detailed process that included verifying voters’ eligibility in the full voter list and verifying their identity with photo identification.

    The Chester County Republican Committee has disputed the county’s version of events, contending that photo ID was not checked for all voters who wrote their names into pollbooks and that poll workers were unable to verify voters’ identities using signature matching.

    Around 7:40 a.m., less than an hour after polls opened, Pennsylvania Department of State officials recommended the county shift to asking voters to cast provisional ballots to eliminate the risk of an ineligible voter casting a ballot, thereby invalidating the election.

    A county spokesperson said there is no evidence that ineligible voters cast ballots during November’s election.

    Whether voters wrote their names into a pollbook or cast a provisional ballot, “the identity and eligibility of each individual was verified by the poll workers,” said Chester County spokesperson Andrew Kreider.

    Would the SAVE Act have changed anything?

    The SAVE Act is a collection of election policies proposed by congressional Republicans that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and mandate all voters show photo ID at the polls.

    Such requirements would not have prevented Chester County’s error, which investigators determined was a clerical error resulting from inexperienced staff with insufficient training and oversight.

    “Sen. McCormick was ignoring the facts and feeding into this larger narrative that our elections can’t be trusted and just feeding into the president’s narrative that there’s something wrong with Pennsylvania elections,” said Lauren Cristella, the CEO of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based civic engagement and good-government organization.

    In addition to Chester County, McCormick pointed to his own experience in close elections — both his 2022 primary loss and his 2024 general election win — as a reason he supports the bill’s proof of citizenship and voter ID requirements.

    The policy, which passed the Republican-led U.S. House, still faces an uphill battle in the U.S. Senate, where it would need 60 votes to advance. It has faced significant opposition from Democrats who say it would needlessly make it harder for people to vote.

    The proof of citizenship requirement, critics say, would place a higher burden on married people whose last names no longer match their birth certificates.

    Speaking to reporters last week, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said he was “vehemently opposed” to the policy, arguing it would nationalize elections.

    “We are not going to turn our elections over to Donald Trump,” he said.

  • Words have consequences, especially when you are Jewish

    Words have consequences, especially when you are Jewish

    Last month, a Pittsburgh-area man admitted in federal court that he made an online antisemitic threat to a public official.

    “Go back to Israel or better yet, exterminate yourself and save us the trouble,” Edward Owens Jr. wrote on Facebook Messenger, adding, “we will not stop until your kind is nonexistent.”

    This was not some random act — it is part of a larger issue of rising political violence, and an example of what many Jews encounter when they turn on their phones or scroll through their feeds.

    The American Jewish Committee’s just-released “State of Antisemitism in America 2025 Report” lays bare the scope of the problem. Online is where American Jews experience antisemitism the most, with 73% seeing or hearing antisemitic content or being personally targeted.

    Of those who experienced online antisemitism, 54% found it on Facebook — up 7 points from 2024 — while 38% experienced it on YouTube. That is an especially alarming number, given that it demonstrates an 11-point jump from the year before. Instagram and TikTok also saw concerning increases in reported antisemitic content.

    What were once quiet murmurings are now getting very loud. Words matter. AJC’s report found that 55% of American Jews are altering their behavior out of fear of antisemitism. That includes the 39% who are not posting content online that could identify them as Jewish or reveal their views on Jewish issues.

    It’s self-censorship as a means of self-preservation. You don’t know who is reading or who may be triggered by what you post. The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle reported that the FBI examined Owens’ phone and found searches tied to antisemitism and “Pittsburgh Jews.”

    Owens also texted a friend that he was “ready to hunt down Jews for extermination.” Those may have just been the words of a bitter man who felt Jews were to blame for everything lacking in his life. But Owens also owned several guns, including a 9 mm pistol FBI agents found in his truck with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

    Noah Rubin, a Penn engineering student, during a “No hate on campus” rally at the University of Pennsylvania in 2024.

    We don’t know whether Owens’ words would have turned into violence — the online threats and gun charges were handled separately in this case. However, we also don’t have the luxury of parsing whether someone is merely spewing venom to put a scare into people or is contemplating something more sinister.

    Either way, it has an impact. AJC’s report found that 21% of American Jews who experienced antisemitism online felt physically threatened by these incidents.

    Put yourself in the shoes of the official who received Owens’ message. Chances are you’ll be rattled by what you read and contact the authorities, who are better equipped to hunt down cowards like Owens who use online aliases. Then you’ll have a better idea of what it’s like to be an American Jew in 2026.

    Jews in America had long been insulated from violent antisemitism. It was something that happened elsewhere. Then, the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were murdered, changed that and precipitated hundreds of incidents in which Jews have been targeted simply for being Jewish.

    Last April, Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence was torched on the second night of Passover. As with the Owens case, this is what public officials who are also publicly Jewish are currently facing.

    Owens is a sorry footnote in this spasm of hate. He will rightfully be forgotten after he is sentenced in April. But what we can’t forget is that he has plenty of company. Jewish or not, that should worry us all.

    Marcia Bronstein is the director of the American Jewish Committee’s Philadelphia/Southern New Jersey regional office.

  • CBS kills Stephen Colbert’s interview with a Democratic candidate. So why was Josh Shapiro allowed on the show?

    CBS kills Stephen Colbert’s interview with a Democratic candidate. So why was Josh Shapiro allowed on the show?

    A defiant Stephen Colbert blasted CBS on Monday for killing an interview with a Texas Democrat, blaming arcane rules being enforced by the Trump administration.

    “He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said of State Rep. James Talarico, who is running in the Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas.

    CBS issued a statement claiming they didn’t prohibit him from running an interview.

    “The Late Show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico,” the statement read. “The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The Late Show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal-time options.”

    The decision comes down to something known as the equal-time rule, a federal requirement put into law in 1934 that requires broadcast stations like CBS to provide comparable airtime to political opponents during an election. Cable networks like Fox News and Comedy Central, home to The Daily Show, are not bound to those rules, allowing them to be as partisan as they choose.

    News programs on broadcast TV (such as Meet the Press and Face the Nation) are exempt from the rule, and the Federal Communications Commission has not enforced it on late-night shows since 2006, when it ruled then-California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno qualified as a “bona fide news interview.”

    But that is changing under the Trump administration. FCC chairman Brendan Carr, who pressured affiliates to take ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air in September, issued a notice to broadcasters last month stating that late-night and daytime TV talk shows may no longer be exempt from the rule, claiming some were “motivated by partisan purposes.”

    The move was criticized by FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat appointed by former President Joe Biden, who called it “an escalation in this FCC’s ongoing campaign to censor and control speech.”

    Colbert said CBS prohibited the interview with Talarico from airing Monday night. Instead, it was posted in its entirety on Colbert’s YouTube channel.

    “At this point, [Carr has] just released a letter that says he’s thinking about doing away with the exemption for broadcast for late night. He hasn’t done away with it yet,” Colbert said. “But my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had.”

    Talarico told Colbert that Trump and Republicans ran against cancel culture during the last election, but now the current administration is “trying to control what we watch, what we say, what we read.”

    “And this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture, the kind that comes from the top,” Talarico said. “Corporate media executives are selling out the First Amendment to curry favor with corrupt politicians.”

    Bill Carter, who covered late-night television for decades at the New York Times and currently writes for the website LateNighter, called CBS’s capitulation “shameful,” especially since the FCC has not moved yet to enforce the rule.

    “Trump’s intention is to mute free speech of his critics, and he’s found the rule in the FCC and decided he can do this,” Carter said. “And he’s got the broadcasters cowed a bit.”

    “Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV,” Colbert added.

    How was Josh Shapiro able to appear on Colbert’s show?

    Governor Josh Shapiro announced his re-election campaign weeks before appearing on Colbert’s show last month.

    Despite the FCC’s threat to crack down on networks, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was able to appear on The Late Show last month, using his time to bash Trump’ immigration crackdown in Minneapolis as “pure evil” and Vice President JD Vance as a “sycophant” and a “suck-up.”

    So why didn’t CBS ban Colbert from airing Shapiro’s interview?

    The FCC’s equal-time rule applies strictly to a “legally qualified candidate for any public office.” Despite announcing his reelection campaign in Philadelphia on Jan. 8, Shapiro did not become an official candidate until Tuesday, when the state’s official filing period opened. It runs through March 10.

    Shapiro was able to appear not only on Colbert’s show, but also on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, which has also found itself a target of the FCC under Carr.

    “I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View, and some of these other programs that you have, still qualify as bona fide news programs and therefore are exempt from the equal opportunity regime that Congress has put in place,” Carr said in a September interview with conservative CNN commentator Scott Jennings.

    It’s also why U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s forthcoming interview with Colbert is still slated to air on the network Wednesday. While Ossoff (D., Ga.) has announced he is running for reelection in Georgia, the window for candidates to officially file paperwork for their primaries does not open until March 2.

    Neither CBS nor Ossoff’s campaign has commented on the interview.

    The equal-time rule also applies to radio broadcasts, where conservative talk shows are among the most dominant formats and regularly feature Republican candidates for office during election years. Then-candidate Trump did multiple interviews on 1210 WPHT in Philadelphia during the 2024 election.

    Carr has said he does not plan to enforce a stricter equal-time rule on radio stations the way he has for television networks, claiming in a news conference last month there wasn’t a similar bona fide news exemption “being misconstrued on the radio side.”

  • Josh Shapiro tells Kristi Noem he’ll ‘aggressively pursue every option’ to block new ICE detention centers in Pa., in letter to DHS

    Josh Shapiro tells Kristi Noem he’ll ‘aggressively pursue every option’ to block new ICE detention centers in Pa., in letter to DHS

    Gov. Josh Shapiro implored Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this week to reconsider converting warehouses in Berks and Schuylkill counties into mass immigration detention centers, citing “real harms” to the communities.

    In a Thursday letter to Noem obtained by The Inquirer, Shapiro questioned the legality of the facilities, which the governor said could hold up to 9,000 people in total.

    Hinting at a possible lawsuit, Shapiro said if DHS goes through with converting the sites, his administration will “aggressively pursue every option to prevent these facilities from opening and needlessly harming the good people of Pennsylvania.”

    As part of President Donald Trump’s expanding deportation agenda, the federal government has started purchasing warehouses across the country to flip into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. ICE is planning to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers, The Washington Post reported.

    So far, two have been bought in Pennsylvania — a nearly 520,000-square-foot facility in Upper Bern Township and another in Tremont Township, where the purchase has drawn the ire of concerned residents.

    Shapiro slammed the department’s escalating immigration enforcement strategy, saying that ICE and other federal immigration agents “resort to unnecessary and excessive force, leading to innocent people being injured or tragically killed.”

    “Your Department’s record is reason enough to oppose your plan to use warehouses in Schuylkill and Berks Counties as detention centers,” Shapiro wrote, adding that the warehouses would also negatively impact residents’ health and safety, deplete tax revenue, and put extra stress on local communities and emergency response.

    Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, confirmed ICE’s purchase of these two warehouses and the department’s plans to use them as detention facilities in a statement to The Inquirer Friday.

    She said that the sites will “undergo community impact studies and a rigorous due diligence process to make sure there is no hardship on local utilities or infrastructure prior to purchase” and that the facilities would create economic benefits, including bringing more than 11,000 jobs to the two Pennsylvania communities in total.

    “Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, ICE has new funding to expand detention space to keep these criminals off American streets before they are removed for good from our communities,” McLaughlin said.

    At an unrelated event last week, the Democratic governor blasted the agency’s “secretive” purchase of the Berks County warehouse, saying he was not alerted of the decision ahead of time.

    At the time, Shapiro said the state was exploring “what legal options we may have to stop” the ICE purchase but said those options were slim.

    Shapiro has become more forceful in his opposition to federal immigration enforcement activities in recent weeks, especially since federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month.

    He’s said the Trump administration’s strategies in American cities make communities less safe, violate constitutional rights, and erode trust in law enforcement.

    Shapiro, who is seen as a likely contender for the White House in 2028, is up for reelection this year. His likely November opponent is Treasurer Stacy Garrity, a Trump-endorsed Republican who has urged cooperation with ICE.

    In his letter to Noem, Shapiro said that DHS has not engaged local leaders to discuss the warehouse purchases and that both Democratic and Republican state and local officials have objected to the department’s “plans to interfere with our communities because of the chaos and harm your actions will bring.”

    Some of Shapiro’s cabinet secretaries also penned an additional letter to Noem where they stressed that the facilities would be detrimental to the communities’ environment and public health and safety.

    “The stress each facility will place on local infrastructure will, among other things, jeopardize Pennsylvanians’ access to safe water, deplete resources and infrastructure needed for emergencies, and overextend already strained emergency response personnel,” wrote Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra L. Bogen, Fire Commissioner Thomas Cook, Emergency Management Director Randy Padfield, Environmental Protection Secretary Jessica Shirley, and Labor Secretary Nancy A. Walker.

    In addition to the warehouses, DHS is also leasing new office space throughout the country, including in the Philadelphia area. The department said back-office staff, including lawyers and analysts, will be moving into a building in Berwyn, and the department will also share space with the Department of Motor Vehicles at Eighth and Arch Streets in Center City, WIRED reported.

    Despite the governor’s vocal opposition to Trump’s enforcement strategies, Pennsylvania still cooperates with ICE. Shapiro’s administration honors some ICE detainers in state prisons and provides ICE with access to state databases that include personal identifying information for immigrants.

    Immigrant rights groups have for months called on Shapiro to take more decisive action against federal immigration enforcement in Pennsylvania and end all cooperation with the agency.

    Staff writer Gillian McGoldrick contributed reporting.