Temple University law students and members of Juntos detail the findings of a new report on an ICE detention center in Moshannon Valley Sept. 3, 2024 (Photo courtesy Juntos)
Immigrants and asylum seekers detained at a former federal prison in rural Pennsylvania are subject to physical and psychological abuse, lack adequate access to health care, and face retaliation for standing up against mistreatment, a report released this week titled “In the Shadow of the Valley” claims.
Based on interviews with 70 people being held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, the report released Wednesday by the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University Beasley School of Law and the immigrant rights group Juntos backs a call to close the facility and others used by federal immigration authorities.
“This report serves to confirm what we at Juntos have been loudly declaring since the announcement of Moshannon’s opening: immigrant detention is inhumane, cruel, and unnecessary, and it is our duty to fight until all of these facilities are shut down once and for all,” Juntos Executive Director Erika Guadalupe Nuñez said in a statement.
People held at Moshannon described being stripped of their clothes and belongings and issued jumpsuits that are color-coded depending on their assigned security level. Men sleep 80 to a room in dormitory-like “pods” without peace or privacy. Essentials like soap and toilet paper are rationed and often run out. Solitary confinement is used as punishment without rules and some people are held arbitrarily for weeks or months at a time, those interviewed for the report said.
With more than 1,800-beds, Moshannon Valley is the largest immigration detention center in the northeast. Coordinated by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, a group of community-based organizations, law school clinics, and nonprofit legal groups conducted in-person and telephone interviews of people detained at Moshannon to produce the report.
Temple Associate Professor of Law Jennifer Lee said the accounts of people detained at Moshannon Valley were not surprising and noted that the anecdotes that come out of immigration detention centers across the country are eerily similar. What’s shocking to many, Lee said, is that the people held under the conditions in Moshannon are not being punished for a crime but simply being detained while waiting as their immigration cases are being processed.
“We don’t really see the difference between the federal prison it once was and the federal civil immigration facility that it now is,” Lee said.
Moshannon Valley detention center opened as a privately run federal prison in 2006 and closed in March 2021 after President Joe Biden signed an executive order barring renewed contracts with private prison companies. It reopened eight months later as an immigration detention center for men and women under a contract between the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Clearfield County, which paid the publicly traded GEO Group to operate the facility.
ICE pays Clearfield County nearly $3 million a month plus a daily rate per person held that depends on the overall population of the facility, according to the contract. A spokesperson for ICE said the agency was unable to provide a response to the report by the deadline for this article.
The arrangement between ICE and Clearfield is not unusual and permits GEO Group to skirt onerous federal contract requirements, the report says. At least six other Pennsylvania counties had contracts to operate immigration detention facilities or house detainees in county jails, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Other facilities, including one that housed women and children in a former nursing home operated by Berks County, have been the subject of scrutiny by immigrant advocacy groups that flagged abuse and inhumane conditions.
While ICE said the center provided schooling and access to medical and mental health care, advocates noted reports that showed some children had not received timely medical treatment. In 2016, the state Department of Health revoked the center’s license after finding it was licensed only to house delinquent children. Berks County appealed and an administrative law judge reversed the decision saying that it was a result of political pressure.
Before ICE closed that facility in 2021, Berks County paid $75,000 to settle a federal lawsuit on behalf of a Honduran refugee who was repeatedly raped by a staff member at the facility. The staff member pleaded guilty in 2016, according to published reports.
The report on Moshannon Valley says more than half of the people interviewed experienced or witnessed mistreatment by staff at the facility such as physical harm or threats of force. Others reported racist remarks and discrimination on the basis of religion or sexual orientation.
More than a quarter of those interviewed said they had been placed in solitary confinement, in which they were kept isolated in cells for 23 or 24 hours a day.
“Although placement in SMU is supposed to be ‘nonpunitive,’ the reality is that SMU is a painful, isolating, and punitive experience that has serious consequences for people’s health and well-being,” the report says.
Vague rules about the use of solitary confinement give staff wide latitude on when to use it and allow them to “weaponize” the treatment against detainees, the report says. In one instance described in the report, 44 people were placed in the solitary confinement unit for protesting regular searches of detainees’ belongings.
People held at Moshannon also reported barriers to justice such as retaliation by staff for calling attention to issues in the facility and being unable to meet with attorneys or access resources to fight their immigration cases.
The report says about 58% of people interviewed said they experienced medical or mental health issues or inadequate treatment. GEO Group is responsible for the health and welfare of people held in its facilities, but those interviewed described how their time at the facility exacerbated existing conditions or led to new health conditions as staff ignored their concerns, delayed treatment, and blamed inadequate funding for the delays.
Lee said the government’s justification for holding people involved in civil immigration proceedings is to ensure that they appear for hearings in immigration court, but there’s no proof that the practice makes society safer or that it is more efficient.
In fact, Lee said, families in immigration proceedings who have lawyers appear reliably for their hearings and case management programs that ensure people are aware of hearing dates are less expensive compared to the cost of housing them.
“There is an alternative way to do this,” Lee said. “It’s really a system that is broken.”
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