Race to watch: What Bucks County voters need to know about Sheriff Fred Harran and Democratic challenger Danny Ceisler

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Bucks County residents will vote on five row offices that are up for election this year. Among them is the county sheriff, who serves a four-year term.

The office in Bucks County traces back to before the Revolutionary War, when William Penn appointed Richard Noble as the first county sheriff in 1682.

As the county’s chief law enforcement officer, the sheriff manages more than 75 sheriff’s deputies, who ensure security and order in the courts and oversee the transportation of prisoners.

The office is tasked with executing arrest warrants from the county courts and processing civil and administrative documents, including real estate sales. Firearm permitting and serving and enforcing protection from abuse orders also fall under the sheriff’s jurisdiction.

Other duties include providing support to police departments throughout the county in the event of civil unrest or emergency, as well as managing court-ordered property sales, or “sheriff’s sales,” with transparency.

Democrat Danny Ceisler is facing off against incumbent Republican Sheriff Fred Harran in this year’s race.  Here’s everything you need to know about the candidates.

Democrat Danny Ceisler

Danny Ceisler, 33, grew up in Philadelphia. He joined the U.S. Army at the age of 18, and became a military intelligence officer after four years of training.

In 2016, he served in the Joint Special Operations Counter-Terrorism Task Force in Afghanistan, and was awarded a Bronze Star Medal for his service. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he served on the COVID Crisis Management Team at the Pentagon.

He earned his law degree from Temple University School of Law. He worked at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office during law school, and as an attorney has represented victims of sexual assault, police officers and veterans in civil lawsuits.

Ceisler moved to Bucks County in 2020 after an active duty military assignment, and settled in Bristol Borough, where he co-owns a pub and brewery and volunteers with Bristol’s Third District Fire Company.

In 2023, he served as a senior public safety official in Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration, working to improve emergency preparedness and response statewide. Since 2025, he has worked as the chief operating officer of Ceisler Media.

“I’ve spent my whole career in public safety, and I’ve generally been drawn to opportunities to lead teams to accomplish missions,” Ceisler told WHYY News, “and the Bucks County Sheriff’s Office, the sheriff’s office in general, actually is a very unique, important and interesting mission.”

He said his legal, military and governmental experience have prepared him for the role.

“You kind of run the gamut, everything from playing a critical role in the civil justice system to preventing domestic violence through the enforcement of protection from abuse orders to hunting fugitives, which is actually quite similar to work that I did in Afghanistan, which is where we were hunting terrorists,” he said.

Ceisler said he is running to improve the county’s response to domestic violence and hunting fugitives, and to “prevent the harm” he said incumbent Sheriff Fred Harran is causing through his collaboration with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and alignment with the Trump administration.

Harran entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE this past spring. The agreement, which trains roughly a dozen sheriff’s deputies to assist ICE, was met with pushback among residents and county commissioners, who argued that the sheriff does not have the authority to enter into an agreement with an external agency without the commissioners’ approval. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against Harran, and a preliminary injunction calling for the agreement to be blocked until the case is decided is currently being deliberated in the Court of Common Pleas.

The 287(g) agreement “actively harms public safety,” Ceisler said.

“You have a limited number of deputies who have a limited number of hours in a day,” he said. “They have important public safety work to do, and every second they spend doing ICE’s job for it, they’re not doing their own job.”

Ceisler said the county has more than 5,000 outstanding bench warrants.

“Those are fugitives in Bucks County. That is the sheriff’s responsibility to find them and bring them to justice,” he said. “And when they’re doing ICE’s work for it, they’re not doing that. It takes taxpayer resources. It’s an expensive proposition.”

Ceisler said if elected, he “would not voluntarily cooperate with ICE.” He said he would cooperate with ICE in ways that are already established. Current procedures allow ICE access to LiveScan, a database of information about people who have been arrested.

“If there are cases where somebody has received due process and they’ve been convicted of certain classes of crimes and they are in the country illegally, then we would have no issue turning them over to ICE,” Ceisler said. “But what we’re not going to do is go out into the community and proactively do immigration enforcement, because that is, first and foremost, not the sheriff’s job.”

Harran testified in a recent court hearing that the office would not conduct raids or check people’s immigration status during routine interactions, and instead would focus only on people who have arrest warrants and are wanted by ICE.

Ceisler said a lot of people are learning about the sheriff’s role for the first time because of the 287(g) agreement.

He said the agreement is unnecessary because Bucks County is not a sanctuary county and the correctional facility already cooperates with ICE.

“That happened already,” Ceisler said. “That’s been happening for years, that’s been happening under Democratic and Republican administrations in Bucks County and in the White House. You don’t need 287(g) to do that.”

Collaboration with ICE also hurts law enforcement’s relationship with the county’s immigrant communities, Ceisler said. Foreign-born residents make up more than 10% of the county’s population, according to 2023 U.S. Census data.

“There’s a reason why the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the IACP, which is perhaps the leading organization of Chiefs of Police in the country, of which Fred Harran is a member, really cautions against local law enforcement getting involved in immigration,” he said. “Because if you have a community that is afraid to call the police because they’re afraid they’re going to be rounded up [and] deported for just reporting crime, then that leaves crime unreported, and it makes it harder to get people to come into the courthouse to testify.”

He said if elected, he would work with nonpolitical organizations working with immigrant communities in Bucks County to repair the damage that Harran’s ICE agreement has already caused.

Other priorities include executing the office’s outstanding warrants, especially for people who have committed more serious offenses, Ceisler said.

He also wants to go beyond serving protection from abuse orders and create an intergovernmental domestic violence task force to provide wraparound services for victims of domestic violence.

“There are nonprofits doing fantastic work in this space, in Bucks County already, but I’d like my office to better partner with them, the District Attorney’s Office as well as social services, to ensure that people who are in abusive situations get the care and services they need as quickly as possible, and that offenders and abusers are dealt with swiftly,” he said.

As sheriff, Ceisler said he would work in a bipartisan way.

“There’s no liberal or conservative way to serve a warrant, to serve a protection from abuse order,” he said. “My hope would be that nobody ever views me as a Democratic sheriff. I want them to view me as a nonpartisan law enforcement official who is just doing the job as effectively as I possibly can.”

Ceisler has been endorsed by Bucks County AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood PA Action, Moms Demand Action Gun Sense Distinction, Transport Workers Local 234, VoteVets, New Politics, American Federation of Teachers –  Pennsylvania, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former U.S. Rep. Jim Greenwood.

Republican Fred Harran

Incumbent Bucks County Sheriff Fred Harran, 61, was born and raised in New York City. He moved to Bucks County 39 years ago when he became a police officer in Bensalem Township and currently resides in Bristol Borough.

Harran said seeing New York Police Department officers in the community as a child led him to pursue a career in law enforcement.

“From when I was a little boy, seeing the NYPD in my neighborhood and interacting with the officers in New York gave me a love for the profession of law enforcement,” he told WHYY News in an email response to questions for this article.

Harran served in law enforcement in Bensalem for 38 years, working as the director of public safety for the last 16 years of his tenure there. Under his leadership, Bensalem became the first police department in the United States to implement a rapid DNA system in 2017, and in 2020, the township police launched a co-responder program, pairing social workers with police officers to assist on some calls.

Harran holds a Master of Science degree in Criminal Justice Administration from St. Joseph’s University, and graduated from the Northwestern University School of Police Staff and Command.

Since becoming sheriff in 2022, Harran said his biggest challenge has been “the resistance of certain leaders and institutions within the county government to change the way things have always been done.”

“Throughout my entire career in law enforcement, including as Director of Public Safety in Bensalem, I’ve always worked to identify trends in community policing and public safety to make a bigger impact on the communities we served — things like DNA, co-responder program, and more,” he said in an email. “That’s the emphasis I brought to the Sheriff’s Office — and we have, including creating the office’s first K9 Unit, enhancing DNA collection and use, and even launching a countywide Police Athletic League. While we got these done, it is always a common refrain that just because these haven’t been done in the past, we shouldn’t be doing them now. That’s not how I operate.”

As sheriff, Harran said he’s invested in deputies and training, and worked to include an emphasis on de-escalation and crisis intervention. The office created the first-ever K-9 unit for the office, and one of the deputies and their K-9 partner were recently recognized by the FBI for their role in arresting a bombing suspect.

Harran said he has also worked with deputies to establish the Sheriff’s Community Outreach and Public Engagement, or SCOPE, unit, to address issues including homelessness, substance abuse and veterans’ issues.

Harran said the office has reduced the county’s warrant backlog by 40% since he took office.

“This is who I am, and I still have important work to do for the people of Bucks County,” Harran said of why he’s running again.

Harran defended his decision to enter into the 287(g) agreement with ICE, characterizing it as “collaboration and strategic deployment of all available resources” in the service of “community safety.”

“This program serves as a common-sense, targeted tool within our existing criminal justice process, specifically designed to assist us in handling individuals who have committed crimes and have warrants in Bucks County and are also present without legal authorization,” he wrote.

He said the collaboration allows “a handful of trained deputies to utilize a federal immigration information database solely for individuals taken into custody based on existing criminal charges and outstanding Bucks County warrants.”

“The program is strictly limited to individuals already within the criminal justice process and does not authorize our deputies to perform general immigration enforcement functions in the community or inquire about immigration status during routine interactions,” he wrote. “Crucially, we have and will continue to maintain open lines of communication with the immigrant community, faith leaders and other community stakeholders to ensure the initiative’s purpose is clear and its effectiveness shared.”

Harran argued the agreement equates to fiscal savings, since the cost of training for deputies is covered by the federal government and transferring people wanted by ICE into ICE custody saves the county money since they don’t have to incarcerate and transport those individuals.

If elected to a second term, Harran plans to make the Sheriff’s Office a “fully accredited law enforcement agency.” He also wants to integrate new technology, including data analysis, to better understand crime trends, upgrading equipment and providing training on the latest law enforcement techniques.

A continued focus, Harran said, would be reducing the county’s warrant backlog.

“We have made significant strides in reducing the backlog of outstanding warrants, and we will continue this important work. Each warrant served holds an offender accountable and removes potentially dangerous individuals from our streets,” he said. “By aggressively and safely serving these warrants, we improve public safety and ensure the justice system can proceed. This will remain a core operational focus of the office.”

He also has released more than a dozen episodes of a podcast from the office, “Law & Order: BUX.”

“We’ve had amazing guests, from sexual assault survivors discussing the importance of DNA testing in law enforcement, reviewed cold cases and how we’ve broken them, received legislative updates from state lawmakers and and county row officers, and even done some AMAs [short for “ask me anything,” a popular online Q-and-A session] where we just took questions from the public about what they wanted to know about,” Harran said. “It’s been extremely rewarding to hear so much positive feedback from the community and we keep gaining listeners and followers each episode.”

Harran has been endorsed by the Bucks County Police Chiefs Association, Pennsylvania Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #40, Bucks County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #53, Pennsylvania State Troopers Association, Philadelphia Police Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5 and Philadelphia Firefighters And Paramedics Union IAFF Local #22.