Federal agents arrested 13 illegal immigrants outside a Pennsylvania driver's licensing center after local residents and police called in tips about an unusually large crowd of suspected immigrant truck drivers gathered at the facility, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to Fox News Digital.
The scene at the West Kittanning Driver's Licensing Center near Kittanning, Pennsylvania, turned chaotic when some of those present fled on foot and abandoned their vehicles in the street as ICE agents moved in. Armstrong County Sheriff Frank Pitzer said only a "handful" of agents tried to handle "over 100 people."
The arrested individuals included nationals from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, DHS said. One person may face additional charges of resisting arrest and assault on an officer. The incident remains under investigation.
The operation began on a Friday morning when Zach Scherer, a Butler-area firefighter and activist, noticed what he described as an "unusual amount" of people gathered outside the licensing center. He filmed the scene and reached out to authorities.
Scherer told Fox News Digital:
"I reached out to local law enforcement as well as a call to DHS Pittsburgh [to] let them know."
DHS said the East Franklin Township Police Department also called ICE after several citizens reported an "abnormally large amount of individuals" outside the licensing center in Kittanning. That detail matters. This was not a federal dragnet launched from Washington. It was a community-driven response, ordinary Pennsylvanians picking up the phone because something looked wrong.
By later that afternoon, Scherer said ICE was still present at the facility and 13 people had been taken into custody. Neighbor Gary Klingensmith recounted the scene to KDKA, saying that when officers opened big-rig cab doors, "like 10 people came out" of some of them. He described people running through yards to escape ICE and said there were "multiple" big rigs in the licensing center lot.
Sheriff Pitzer painted a picture of a scene that quickly spiraled beyond what the small number of federal agents on site could easily manage.
"It went even as far as people exiting their vehicles and abandoning them on the street."
Pitzer told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette he supports the administration's enforcement efforts but wanted to see a "better plan", more agents, presumably, to handle a crowd of that size. That is a fair operational critique, and it underscores a broader point: when federal enforcement actions succeed in part because of public tips, the agencies involved need to be ready for what they find.
The fact that people scattered, running through residential yards, leaving vehicles blocking streets, tells its own story. Lawful visitors to a licensing center do not typically flee at the sight of federal officers. The reaction itself reinforced the concerns that prompted the tips in the first place.
Across the country, courts have increasingly allowed the administration's immigration enforcement to proceed, and the Pennsylvania operation fits squarely within that broader legal and political framework.
PennDOT spokeswoman Alexis Campbell moved quickly to separate the state agency from the federal enforcement action. She told Fox News Digital that PennDOT did not coordinate with federal officials in "any capacity in relation to this activity."
Campbell offered an explanation for the crowd: the West Kittanning center was processing medical form updates for current holders of non-domiciled commercial learner's permits or driver licenses, which she said "resulted in a large number of customers at West Kittanning."
She emphasized that PennDOT follows state and federal law to issue licenses to "lawfully present individuals" and uses the federal SAVE system to verify legal presence. She also noted that PennDOT remains under a federal pause on issuing new non-domiciled commercial driver's licenses, imposed by USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
"Per the direction of FMCSA, no non-domiciled commercial learner's permits or driver licenses were issued or reissued. PennDOT remains steadfast in following state and federal law and there is no activity or transaction occurring at West Kittanning or elsewhere that violates state or federal law."
That statement raises more questions than it answers. If everyone at the licensing center was "lawfully present," why did 13 people end up in ICE custody? If the SAVE system works as advertised, how did illegal immigrants end up in the queue for CDL-related processing in the first place? PennDOT says it followed the rules. DHS says 13 people at that same location were in the country illegally. Both things cannot be entirely true.
Governor Josh Shapiro's office offered little. A representative told Fox News Digital that PennDOT's statements "speak for the governor." That is a convenient posture for an administration that has been at odds with DHS after multiple Pennsylvania-issued licenses were found during arrests of illegal immigrant non-domiciled truckers around the country.
The friction between Harrisburg and Washington on this issue predates the Kittanning incident. Fox News Digital reported that Harrisburg officials previously told the outlet that then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem needed to better maintain her database of lawful residents, effectively shifting blame for licensing failures onto the federal government.
Meanwhile, USDOT Secretary Duffy has been highlighting the issue of illegal immigrants holding non-domiciled CDL licenses. His office declined to comment on the Kittanning arrests specifically. The federal pause on new non-domiciled CDLs suggests Washington sees a systemic problem, not a one-off incident at a single rural licensing center.
Some elected officials around the country have taken a very different approach to ICE operations, openly resisting federal immigration enforcement rather than cooperating with it. The Pennsylvania case stands in contrast: here, it was local police and residents who initiated the chain of events that led to arrests.
The concern about illegal immigrants holding commercial driver's licenses is not abstract. Fox News Digital noted that an Indian national allegedly killed a carload of people on Florida's Turnpike last year while navigating an illegal U-turn near Port St. Lucie. The question of who is behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound tractor-trailer is a public safety issue, not merely an immigration debate.
The Kittanning operation also fits within a broader enforcement trend. A Reuters report cited by Fox News Digital said ICE arrested more than 800 people during the first 12 months of the Trump administration based on tips and records provided by TSA officials. Authorities reviewed some 31,000 traveler records from the TSA's Secure Flight Program, a database created in 2007.
That scale of cooperation between agencies, TSA feeding records to ICE, local police departments calling in tips, ordinary citizens filming what they see and reporting it, represents exactly the kind of layered enforcement that immigration hawks have long argued is necessary. Federal courts have increasingly backed the administration's authority to conduct these operations.
Not everyone agrees. Progressive lawmakers have pushed back sharply against ICE enforcement actions targeting illegal immigrants, with some even demanding reparations for those swept up in operations. That posture is difficult to square with the reality on the ground in Armstrong County, where residents called authorities because they were alarmed by what they saw outside a state licensing facility.
DHS said the incident remains under investigation. The specific immigration or criminal charges filed against the 13 arrested individuals have not been disclosed publicly. The exact breakdown of nationalities among those from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan is unclear. Whether any of the people captured in Scherer's original video were among those ultimately arrested has not been confirmed.
It also remains an open question how many of the people who fled that Friday morning remain unaccounted for. Sheriff Pitzer described a scene with over 100 people and only a handful of agents. Thirteen arrests from a crowd that size, with people scattering in every direction, suggests the operation netted only a fraction of those present.
The growing international consensus toward stricter border enforcement and deportations makes the domestic resistance to operations like this one look increasingly out of step, not just with American voters, but with the direction of Western democracies broadly.
When regular citizens in rural Pennsylvania feel compelled to call federal authorities because something at their local DMV doesn't look right, and those calls lead to 13 arrests, the system is working the way it should. The only failure is that it took a tip from the public to uncover what the licensing system should have caught on its own.
