‘Inhumane conditions’: Report finds Pa.’s largest immigrant detention center ‘riddled with human rights violations’

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A report by Temple law students and Juntos, a Philadelphia-based immigrant advocacy organization, documents testimonies describing “inhumane, punitive and dangerous conditions” at Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a privately-operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center located in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania.

With a capacity of 1,876, the facility is the largest immigrant detention center in the Northeast. It was formerly a federal prison and re-opened as an ICE detention center in 2021. GEO Group, Inc., a private company, operates Moshannon and more than a dozen other ICE detention centers nationwide.

“It is a facility riddled with massive human rights violations,” said Erika Guadalupe Núñez, executive director of Juntos. Núñez said people detained by ICE in Philadelphia are most often sent to Moshannon. Most recently, Philadelphia resident Sereyrath “One” Van, was sent to the center, according to advocates at VietLead.

ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report outlines three areas of abuse: physical and psychological mistreatment, barriers to justice — including lack of legal representation — and problems with health and well-being.

Santiago, an Afro-Latino immigrant from Colombia who was detained at Moshannon for six months, said at a press event Thursday that he was “treated like an animal” there, and that officers were “very racist.”

Santiago, who used an alias to protect his security, said he had “a small verbal argument” with a fellow detainee and was put in solitary confinement for two months.

“Two months they put me in the hole, locked up in a cell,” he said. “As if I were a criminal, as if I had murdered someone, when all I had done was argue with a fellow detainee. I felt very frustrated, I felt like I was going to go crazy in that place.”

He described a pattern of officials using solitary confinement to punish detainees for small infractions, and also alleged that the guards abused him physically.

“The truth is, Moshannon is a place where they don’t treat you like an immigrant, but as if you were a criminal,” Santiago said.

The authors of “In the Shadow of the Valley” — which include Temple law students Cristina de Arana, Alexandra Leone, Bianca Taipe and supervising professor Jennifer Lee — compiled information from site visits,  former and current detainees’s testimonies and public records requests.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania (ACLU-PA) and community-based organizations — including Juntos, MILPA, Casa San José, Make the Road PA, New Sanctuary Movement, VietLead and more — coordinated site visits and conducted interviews with people who were detained at the center. The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Transnational Law and Civil Justice Clinics and Villanova Law School’s Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic also provided support.

Of the 77 immigrants interviewed for the report in the spring and summer of 2023, more than half expressed medical or mental health issues, and 50% said they experienced general mistreatment by facility staff. More than 30% said they were subject to racial or derogatory slurs, and 6% said they were victims of physical force.

“Lots of folks name not having access to their medication, dealing with complications from the poor living conditions, like getting respiratory infections from the crowded pods,” Núñez said, noting that on a site visit she witnessed approximately 70 people in one “pod” that were still housed together even after one person in the group tested positive for COVID-19.

Advocates said their safety concerns for detainees are reinforced by recent events. In August, three detainees were stabbed and taken to the hospital after a fight broke out. In December 2023, detainee Franklline Okpu was found dead of an overdose, according to a coroner report.

The ACLU-PA and other groups have filed a federal complaint over “inhumane conditions” at Moshannon Valley Processing Center with the Department of Homeland Security’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) office.

Jennifer Lee, associate professor of Law at Temple University and supervisor of the report, said beyond bettering conditions at the center, the report also raises questions about why the detention center exists — especially when many of the people detained have ongoing cases that have not yet been decided.

“This is a facility that holds people for civil purposes. They’re not serving any sort of criminal sentence,” she said. “It’s not supposed to be punishment under the law. Yet, they’re held in something that basically is a prison.”

Lee said the federal government pays GEO Group approximately $3.4 million a month to operate the center. The corporation receives additional fees for each person detained there, on top of a fixed $2.8 million a month rate.

“I think that’s where we come to the question of, why does the facility exist, given that there are other ways to ensure that people show up to their immigration court proceedings and get processed through the immigration system, a lot of proven community-based alternatives,” she said. “And we could use the money for other things, right?”