Pennsylvania advocates call on ICE to release Moshannon detainee for medical treatment

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Immigrant rights advocates say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are neglecting the medical needs of a detainee held in Pennsylvania and should release him to receive treatment for kidney disease.

Izzy Aly, a 40-year-old Egyptian national and Florida resident, was detained by ICE in December 2025 and has been held at Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, for the past five months. According to Aly’s friend and advocate J Mark Barfield, who is coordinating a movement to “free Izzy,” Aly had an active application for a green card when he was detained.

Advocates say a medical exam conducted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in January revealed Aly had stage 3 kidney disease, but Aly was not told of the diagnosis until March. His requests for treatment have been denied, advocates said at a press conference Tuesday, and last week Aly reported seeing blood in his urine.

“This young man needs care, actual care, right now,” said Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition. “The level of medical care that he needs, so that he doesn’t have permanent damage to his body, so that he doesn’t die, he will never get at Moshannon. Because that’s not how these detention centers are designed.”

The coalition of immigrant rights advocates, which included Free Migration Project, Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition and the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, also called on Clearfield County commissioners to cancel the county’s contract with ICE and GEO Group, the private prison corporation that operates Moshannon.

The Philadelphia ICE Field Office and the national ICE media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. GEO Group responded to a request for comment by referring questions to ICE.

Most people detained by ICE in the Philadelphia region are sent to Moshannon. With a maximum capacity of 1,876, it is the largest immigrant detention center in the Northeast. According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, as of April 2, the facility had an average daily population of over 1,600.

Aly’s case is “not an isolated incident,” Rivera said, adding that advocates are in contact with other people at Moshannon who are experiencing or have experienced medical neglect. In April, a group of detainees at Moshannon started a hunger strike to protest what they described as medical neglect and spoiled food.

In the past three years, three detainees — Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, Chaofeng Ge and Frankline Okpu — have died at Moshannon. Nationwide, 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detainees in more than two decades.

“This is a systemic failure rooted in a detention system that treats human beings as disposable,” said Zeynep Emanet, the civic engagement manager at CAIR Philadelphia.

A U.S. Senate investigation released last fall found more than 80 credible reports of medical neglect in ICE detention facilities, including incidents in which detainees were denied insulin and cases of spoiled, dirty or inadequate food and water supplies.

Rivera said the goal of organizing on behalf of Aly is to “prevent a death.”

“None of us want to be here again mourning another life lost,” she said.