This Pa. Democrat is running a Trump-style campaign, railing against refugees

The music is hair-raising. Images of undocumented immigrants crossing the border play across the screen. And the claim is extreme: The candidate running for the Pennsylvania House was trying to bring in Afghan refugees to take Cambria County workers’ jobs.

The attack ad running in the Johnstown area isn’t from the GOP candidate that former President Donald Trump endorsed.

It’s by the incumbent Democrat, State Rep. Frank Burns, who has taken a page out of Trump’s playbook.

Burns, 48, is seeking reelection to a ninth term to represent the reddening 72nd Pennsylvania House District, which Trump won by 15 percentage points in 2020. It’s one of a few competitive races that will determine which party controls the state House.

Burns’ opponent, Republican Amy Bradley, is a local chamber of commerce leader who helped lead the city redevelopment project Vision Together 2025. The project has been criticized by Burns and the local community for its proposed refugee resettlement plan, which Bradley played a key part in devising and communicating to the public according to meeting minutes from the time.

Burns is one of few Democrats left who represent rural parts of the state, as longtime Democratic strongholds in Western Pennsylvania and rural areas become more conservative, while suburban areas in Southeastern Pennsylvania shift blue.

He’s been a “no” vote on several social-issue bills that required Democrats, with only a one-seat majority, to reach across the aisle to two Lower Bucks County Republicans to pass them. And he says he shares the “traditional values” of his district, including responsible gun ownership and antiabortion beliefs. (“I’m a Democrat because I don’t want to see the exploitation of people for profits by these big corporations,” Burns said.)

In the attack ad, Burns claims that Bradley wanted to bring in 100 Afghan families and give them jobs held by locals, spend more on public housing, and thus make the community less safe — a mirror of Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric that has been widely criticized as racist and xenophobic.

“We need secure borders and safer communities, but Amy Bradley ignored that,” the narrator says in the Burns ad running on TV and streaming services. (The redevelopment project was targeted to improve Johnstown’s economic standing and did not have any scope over crossings at the United States-Mexico border.)

The ad is in reference to Vision Together 2025′s project to resettle approximately 100 Afghan families in Johnstown to help meet workforce needs there. Bradley was a voting member on the nonprofit board at the time, and due to community pushback, the Afghan refugee resettlement plan was rejected in 2022.

The nonprofit’s work, originally led by local leaders in the public and private sectors, was intended to redevelop the struggling region’s economy and community relationships by accessing state and federal grants. But it has been controversial in the Johnstown area, in part due to its earlier efforts to resettle Afghan refugees, the Tribune-Democrat reported.

Burns wants voters to remember that Bradley helped craft talking points to try to fix the public perception of the initiative to resettle Afghan families — a program their community couldn’t support, he said.

Many Afghan refugees had aided and fought alongside the U.S. military during its more than 20-year-long war there, and the people fleeing the country were at risk of persecution once the Taliban took control.

The Afghan refugees would have been resettled in Johnstown, a small city of 18,000 people that is more than 90% white and has a continually declining population.

Burns did not mention their race or ethnicity in an interview, but said his community could not support the needs of refugees.

“Johnstown is one of the poorest cities in Pennsylvania, and people already struggle for jobs and housing and need resources as it is,” Burns said. “They were planning on bringing 100 refugee families. That puts an awful lot of strain on us. We just don’t have the resources to take care of this situation.”

Cathryn Miller-Wilson, the executive director of refugee resettlement agency HIAS Pennsylvania, said any town that resettles refugees requires some early buy-in from the local community, but the “benefits are long term and far outweigh the costs.”

“The adults start working right away, which means they’re paying taxes right away, which means they’re spending money in the community right away,” Miller-Wilson added, noting refugees’ high rates of entrepreneurship that outpaces other immigrant groups and U.S.-born residents.

HIAS Pennsylvania has resettled hundreds of Afghan refugees and asylum seekers in the Philadelphia region, many of whom worked for the U.S. military or a nongovernmental organization supporting democracy before the Taliban took over. They chose to work with the U.S. or other groups during the war because they believe in democracy and are happy to be here, Miller-Wilson said.

“We ask immigrants to integrate, to participate in democracy,” Miller-Wilson added. “But when we’re at our best, we’re also taking in what they bring to us.”

Bradley, the Republican, did not respond to requests for comment. In a Facebook video posted to her campaign page, she said the attack ad is “not just true.” She rejected that she ever advocated to “bring thousands of Afghan refugees” to their community.

”Vision Together 2025 at one point looked at a program to help American allies and their families because of their safety issues,” Bradley said in the video posted last week. “Programs like this were working well in other parts of Pennsylvania. It was explored and determined it would not work for Cambria County for a number of reasons, and the plan was dropped.”

Burns said he believed the plan was an effort to bring in cheap labor that refugees would provide, instead of paying quality wages to local workers, a claim that the nonprofit behind Vision Together 2025 has rejected.

Refugees are authorized to work and required to pay taxes. Resettlement agencies help them get jobs and they cannot be discriminated against because of their refugee status, meaning they could not legally be paid less, Miller-Wilson said.

“It doesn’t make sense that Frank Burns is a Democrat,” she added.

The ad, Burns said proudly, is a direct imitation of Trump’s recent criticisms of refugees and undocumented immigrants. He won’t say who he plans to vote for in the presidential election.

He’s also proud that he’s been a main voice blocking Democratic legislation that he thought was too extreme from passing the state House.

“I’ve been honest with [Democratic leadership]. I tell them up front, ‘I don’t support this and I’m not going to support it,’” Burns said. “They don’t have a choice. They have to live with it.”

One of those bills was a constitutional amendment sponsored by House Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) to change the number of votes needed to recommend someone for clemency. Currently, Pennsylvania requires a unanimous vote of the five-member Board of Pardons.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether it was aware of Bradley’s past advocacy for Afghan refugees to move into the community, and whether that changes its endorsement.

Trump, in a video-recorded endorsement, said Bradley is a “fantastic young woman” and has his “complete and total endorsement.”

“She is far better than her opponent, who we all know is not good,” Trump added.