WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security is putting more than 500 “sanctuary jurisdictions” across the country on notice — including two counties and a borough short distances from Lycoming County.

Montour and Centre counties and the borough of State College are among the 16 cited in Pennsylvania, according to the department’s website.

The department on Thursday published a list of the jurisdictions and said each one will receive formal notification that the government has deemed them noncompliant and if they’re believed to be in violation of any federal criminal statutes.

“These sanctuary city politicians are endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press release.

Montour County Commissioner Rebecca Dressler told Bloomsburg-based newspaper the Press-Enterprise late Thursday the county has been included in error.

“Montour County updated its prison policies (in 2017) to be in full compliance with the law,” she said.

“The Montour County Prison routinely contacts ICE to advise them of any foreign-born inmates, the status of an inmate or the expected release date and time of an inmate,” the amended policy states, according to the Press-Enterprise. “Any inmates with a detainer shall be held and the authority issuing the detainer shall be immediately notified of the inmate’s current status.”

Dressler described to the Press-Enterprise years of efforts to be removed from the “sanctuary” classification by the Department of Homeland Security.

“This has been an issue before that previous commissioner boards have tried to address,” Dressler told the Press-Enterprise.

The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted communities, states and jurisdictions that it says aren’t doing enough to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it seeks to make good on President Donald Trump’s campaign promises to remove millions of people in the country illegally.

The list was compiled using a number of factors, including whether the cities or localities identified themselves as sanctuary jurisdictions, how much they complied already with federal officials enforcing immigration laws, if they had restrictions on sharing information with immigration enforcement or had any legal protections for people in the country illegally, according to the department.

Trump signed an executive order on April 28 requiring the secretary of Homeland Security and the attorney general to publish a list of states and local jurisdictions that they considered to be obstructing federal immigration laws. The list is to be regularly updated.

Federal departments and agencies, working with the Office of Management and Budget, would then be tasked with identifying federal grants or contracts with those states or local jurisdictions that the federal government identified as “sanctuary jurisdictions” and suspending or terminating the money, according to the executive order.

If “sanctuary jurisdictions” are notified and the Trump administration determines that they “remain in defiance,” the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security are then empowered to pursue whatever “legal remedies and enforcement measures” they consider necessary to make them comply.

ICE has about 6,000 law enforcement officers — a number that has remained largely static for years — who are able to find, arrest and remove immigrants it is targeting. By relying on local law enforcement, it can quickly scale up the number of staff available to help carry out Trump’s mass deportations agenda.

Communities that don’t cooperate with ICE often say they do so because immigrants then feel safer coming forward if they’re a witness to or victim of a crime. And they argue that immigration enforcement is a federal task, and they need to focus their limited dollars on fighting crime.

“Sanctuary policies are legal and make us all safer,” said a coalition of local officials from across the country and a nonprofit called Public Rights Project in a statement Thursday. They said the list was a fear tactic designed to bully local governments into cooperating with ICE.

The Trump administration has already taken a number of steps targeting states and communities that don’t cooperate with ICE — and has met with pushback in the courts. One executive order issued by Trump directs the Attorney General and Homeland Security Secretary to withhold federal money from sanctuary jurisdictions. Another directs federal agencies to ensure that payments to state and local governments do not “abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies that seek to shield illegal aliens from deportation.”