Days after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis, Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor reaffirmed that he will not cooperate with ICE.
Former Mayor Ed Gainey had taken the same position.
“My stance never changed,” O’Connor told TribLive on Friday. “We’re not going to cooperate.”
O’Connor said the same thing on the campaign trail, promising his administration would not partner with ICE.
“My priority is to turn the city around and help it grow,” O’Connor said. “For us, it’s got to be focusing on public safety in the city of Pittsburgh.”
President Donald Trump has sent a surge of federal officers into Minneapolis, where tensions have escalated sharply.
O’Connor said he had spoken this week with Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, who heads the Democratic Mayors Association. The group has condemned ICE’s actions in the wake of Wednesday’s fatal encounter in Minneapolis, where an ICE officer shot and killed 37-year-old Nicole Macklin Good, a U.S. citizen described as a poet and mother.
“Mayors are on the ground every day working to keep our communities safe,” the association said in a statement Thursday. “If Trump were serious about public safety, he would work with our cities, not against them. If he were serious, he would stop spreading propaganda and lies, and end the fear, the force, and the federal overreach.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has come out strongly against the Trump administration and ICE, penning an op-ed piece for the New York Times with the headline, “I’m the Mayor of Minneapolis. Trump Is Lying to You.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said an ICE officer shot Good in self-defense. Noem described the incident as “domestic terrorism” carried out against ICE officers and claimed Good tried to “run them over and rammed them with her vehicle.”
The circumstances of the incident are in dispute.
In December, ICE agents were involved in a scuffle in Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington neighborhood as they arrested a Latino man.
According to neighbors, two unmarked vehicles sandwiched a white Tacoma in the 400 block of Norton Street, broke the driver’s side window, pulled a man from the vehicle and got into a physical altercation. Pepper spray was deployed and seemed to get in the eyes of both the man being detained and at least one immigration agent.
At least some of the officers on the scene in that incident belong to ICE.
They targeted the man, Darwin Alexander Davila-Perez, a Nicaraguan national, for claiming to be a U.S. citizen while trying to buy a gun, according to court papers.
