Allegheny County Courthouse ICE Arrest Handoff Protocol Activated as ICE Begins Targeting Pittsburgh Courts

Beginning April 21, 2025, ICE operationalized a courthouse arrest strategy in Pittsburgh, sending the first of eventually 46 “target” notifications to the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office — each containing the name, date of birth, country of birth, photograph, and scheduled court appearance time of an immigrant defendant. The notifications, obtained by PublicSource through a public records request, covered both Pittsburgh Municipal Court (32 targets) and the Court of Common Pleas (14 targets), spanning an eight-month period through January 2, 2026.

The operational campaign built directly on a written courthouse protocol that President Judge Susan Evashavik DiLucente had circulated to Allegheny County’s four administrative judges on April 3, 2025. That memo specified that sheriff’s deputies would “take the person into custody and escort them to a Sheriff’s Office space, out of public view, where custody will be transferred to federal agents” — language that assigned county court officers an explicit, written operational role in federal immigration arrests. A revised memo issued June 23, 2025 softened the language to have deputies “escort the ICE agents to the person and then escort the person and ICE agents to a non-public area,” removing explicit reference to the deputies taking custody but still describing coordinated county-federal action inside courthouse walls.

Sheriff Kevin Kraus, a Democrat, maintained throughout the period that his office had “no agreement with ICE” and deputies were “not authorized to take part in immigration enforcement.” His office also stated the April 3 protocol was never implemented. The Community Justice Project and the ACLU of Pennsylvania challenged the policies in a May 5, 2025 letter on behalf of Casa San José, arguing they would restrict court access for immigrants and “reduce trust in local law enforcement by enabling the Sheriff’s Office to arrest immigrant court users for unrelated purported immigration violations.” In March 2026, Allegheny County Council passed legislation — by an 11-3 vote with one abstention — prohibiting county police and employees from cooperating with ICE, a direct legislative response to the courthouse-arrest pattern.

Dual-capacity pattern. The Allegheny courthouse episode is a textbook instance of the dual-capacity mechanism: state-court personnel (county sheriff deputies, answerable to an elected county sheriff) were assigned — in writing, by a judicial officer — to perform operational functions on behalf of a federal immigration enforcement agency. Even where individual officials dispute that the protocol was executed, the existence of the April 3 memo establishes that the judiciary itself formally contemplated and documented a handoff role for county law enforcement inside its own facilities. This mirrors courthouse-arrest patterns documented in New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon between 2017 and 2026, where the contested terrain is not whether ICE may enter but whether state court personnel facilitate the arrests — transforming officers of the state judiciary into operational adjuncts of federal immigration enforcement. [NEEDS VERIFICATION: whether the April 3 memo was signed or adopted by Sheriff Kraus, or originated solely from the judiciary; whether any arrests were actually made at Allegheny courthouses during the April 21–January 2 window.]