Lehigh County officials in Pennsylvania have begun formal eviction proceedings against the Department of Homeland Security, including for an office used by the agency’s investigations arm, after claiming DHS had failed to pay rent on county-owned property for about three years.
“I am immediately terminating our lease agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They should consider themselves evicted,” Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel said in a statement this week. “The department’s failure to pay rent, combined with DHS’s national reputation for recklessness, chaos, and public disorder, warrants ending any relationship with the County. We will not accept their blood money.”
At a news conference on Tuesday, Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley said that a recent county-led inquiry found that Homeland Security Investigations owes the county more than $115,000 in unpaid rent after occupying the Hamilton Financial Center building in Allentown since 2022. The county became aware of the issue during routine reviews of fiscal records.
Pinsley told MS NOW on Friday that the department will have 30 days to vacate and that the county is seeking to collect the full amount of unpaid rent. He sent a letter to Siegel and the county’s board of commissioners earlier this week recommending that the county issue an immediate payment determination of outstanding rent, issue an eviction notice and explore all legal avenues of recouping lost revenue.
The initial rental arrangement began with a memorandum of agreement that was intended to last 10 months and was supposed to be followed by a formal lease. However, according to Pinsley’s memo, the formal lease was never finalized — and no payments were recorded in county financial accounts — leaving the county with uncollected revenue and ongoing occupancy.
DHS later determined that the person who signed the memorandum on its behalf lacked the authority to do so. After that, a standard lease agreement should have begun on Oct. 1, 2023, to last through Sept. 30, 2026, but both parties didn’t agree to the terms of that subsequent lease, which left the three-year agreement unsigned.
“As such, no payment has been made by HSI to the county since the commencement of the MOA and lease agreement on December 1, 2022,” Pinsley wrote.
Neither DHS nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement immediately responded to MS NOW’s request for comment.
The termination of the lease agreement comes as the Trump administration expands its push to deploy ICE officers to cities nationwide in a sweeping immigration crackdown. Tensions over immigration enforcement efforts have escalated in recent weeks following the death of Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman who was shot to death by an ICE officer during an enforcement operation in Minneapolis.
Pinsley wrote in the memo that ICE’s actions in recent weeks “terrorize neighborhoods and create fear rather than safety,” adding that this kind of conduct “is incompatible with democratic governance.”
“We can give them a taste of their own medicine. We’re going to deport ICE,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
Lehigh County District Attorney Gavin Holihan told local news station WFMZ that the office space in question has not been used for deportation or removal operations. Instead, agents from HSI have been collaborating with local law enforcement on investigations into crimes such as human trafficking.
Pinsley said he believes the office does investigate matters including human trafficking, but he also said at the press conference that “the issue that we’ve seen is that [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem has changed a lot of the agents to be very focused on ICE.”
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at CNN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.