No person should be detained while they await the outcome of their immigration proceedings. Unfortunately, the massive immigration detention machine in the United States means that on any given day, tens of thousands of immigrants are held in ICE detention.
What’s worse, the conditions in many immigration detention centers are downright horrific. That’s the case in the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, where those in detention have endured insufficient medical and mental health care, grossly inadequate access to non-English language services, and rampant discrimination.
That’s why ACLU-PA teamed up with Legal Services of New Jersey and the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Carey Law Transnational Law Clinic to file a federal complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties over the conditions at Moshannon.
The complaint includes the detailed accounts of eight participants. One participant describes how he did not receive medical treatment for painful tumors.
Another participant attempted suicide due to depression and an untreated medical condition that worsened while detained.
ICE and GEO staff similarly denied medical care to other participants, often bouncing individuals back and forth between ICE and GEO medical staff, each persistently trying to shift responsibility for needed medical care to the other.
The women participants in the complaint describe how they are particularly vulnerable at Moshannon. They live in cells surrounded by a majority-male population that they cannot interact with, resulting in limited movement outside of their housing unit. Access to menstrual products is extremely restricted, and preventive medical care, like mammograms, are not accessible.
While these conditions are alarming and disturbing, they are not unique to Moshannon.
Moshannon is operated by GEO Group, a for-profit corporation that contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to manage detention centers across the country. Many of these facilities have been exposed to have similarly horrific conditions as we have found in Moshannon.
Our complaint asks the department to open a formal investigation and hold GEO Group and ICE accountable for the conditions at Moshannon.
While ICE detention is cruel, unnecessary, and should not exist, to the extent ICE continues to keep people behind bars, they must do so in a way that adheres to the most basic standards of dignity and rights.
The department’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties is charged with investigating civil rights abuses in ICE detention. It is critical that they take a meaningful and robust approach to this investigation, not only because the detailed accounts from the participants illustrate the serious and pervasive issues that exist at Moshannon but also because they are some of the same issues that the Office of Civil Rights and Liberties identified in their June 2023 recommendations regarding Moshannon.
Despite those recommendations, our complaint is the first time that the public has the full picture of the horrific conditions at Moshannon. That’s because the department does not make their recommendations public where ICE does not not agree with them. This lack of transparency is why our complaint asks the department, at the conclusion of their investigation, to provide a full and public record of the findings and recommendations.
Our clients in detention have endured unfathomable horrors. As one of our client’s, Jose, shared, “I wouldn’t wish on anyone what I went through at Moshannon because of the conditions there, the way I was treated, and the racism I experienced. Even though I am in ICE detention, I am a human being.”
ICE detention should not even exist. There is no good reason to keep a person locked up while they navigate the U.S. immigration machine. But while it does, our clients and the thousands of people who are detained everyday by ICE around the country deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
