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Pittsburgh residents push for sanctuary city law
Nearly 1,500 sign a petition urging city council to codify sanctuary protections
Hallie Lauer
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
hlauer@post-gazette.com
Sep 30, 2025
11:22 AM
With immigration arrests surging across Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh residents are calling on city leaders to turn Mayor Ed Gainey’s informal stance to not work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into law.
Nearly 1,500 Pittsburgh residents signed a petition delivered to city council last week urging council members to declare Pittsburgh a sanctuary city and prohibit all city agencies, including police, from cooperating with ICE or sharing information about a person’s immigration status.
Mr. Gainey has long maintained that his administration will not work with ICE.
“We will do whatever necessary to make our city more welcoming,” he
said at a meeting in Harrisburg just days after President Donald Trump took office in January.
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But now residents and advocates are pushing for a firmer commitment through legislation ahead of the mayoral race next month. The petition was organized by the group Allegheny United For Immigrants Rights and Justice, which is also working to get similar legislation passed at the county level.
"Pittsburgh can claim to be a welcoming city, but without the bedrock, certainty, the city won't turn on immigrant Pittsburghers, that will only be aspirational," June Wearden with Allegheny United for Immigration Rights and Justice told Post-Gazette news partner KDKA last week at the petition presentation event.
Democratic mayoral candidate Corey O’Connor, and likely next mayor, has vowed that his administration will not work with ICE.
Republican candidate Tony Moreno has criticized Mr. Gainey and Mr. O’Connor for asking police officers to “turn their backs on their oaths and fellow law enforcement officers.”
Mr. Moreno, a retired Pittsburgh Police Officer, has previously said that should he be elected, “we will follow the laws of the commonwealth and Constitution of the United States as every Pittsburgh Police officer swears under oath.”
The petition submitted to council asked for a public hearing, where residents will be able to speak directly to council members about sanctuary city laws. From there, council members could introduce legislation that would codify the policy.
There is no date yet for the public hearing, but city code requires it to be scheduled within a “reasonable amount of time.”
Other cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago, have passed similar legislation. In Philadelphia, where the policy was passed in 2016, local police don’t assist with ICE and they don’t turn non-citizens over to the agency after they are released from custody.
Because of the policy, Philadelphia has been added to a list of sanctuary cities released by the Department of Justice earlier this year accusing them of violating federal immigration law. Pittsburgh had appeared on a previous version of the list
but was subsequently removed.
First Published: September 30, 2025, 11:22 a.m.
Updated: September 30, 2025, 4:30 p.m.
Hallie Lauer covers local politics for the Post-Gazette, where she began her career
