Three weeks after members of Congress listened to and then publicly shared concerns from inside of Pennsylvania’s largest immigrant detention center for the first time, U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean said she was blocked from speaking with detainees while visiting the same facility on Wednesday.
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Dean (D., Montgomery) said she was given “a relatively complete tour” and gathered information at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center — a 1,900-bed facility in Crawford County that is the largest of its kind across the entire Northeast.
But while attempting to speak with detainees as she’s done during other oversight visits, Dean said she was told that required advanced permission from the detainees themselves.
Dean questioned the credibility of that prohibition — especially after she said she informed the facility of her plans ahead of time, and after two of her colleagues were recently permitted to speak with detainees during a similar, but unannounced, oversight trip.
“Let’s put it this way, I got a scoop of the BS,” Dean said in an interview.
The four-term lawmaker’s fact-finding trip came after several weeks of escalating tensions around the conditions facing undocumented immigrants in detention centers such as Moshannon Valley and Delaney Hall in Newark. Both facilities are privately run by the same company, GEO Group, and have faced allegations of providing inadequate medical care and nutrition while allowing little outside oversight.
U.S. Reps. Summer Lee and Chris Deluzio, both Pittsburgh-area Democrats, said they heard “real concerns” after emerging from Moshannon Valley on May 28.
Their roughly two-hour tour and discussion with detainees was the first time any member of Congress had successfully entered the facility since President Donald Trump took office. It also followed reports of both poor medical care and a hunger strike led by detainees to protest the food.
Lee and Deluzio said women in particular approached them to say they had not received proper prenatal care. At least one told them she had been sexually assaulted at the center. And watching lunches of chicken, rice and beans being served did not make them less concerned about the quality of the food, the lawmakers said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, later said ICE “welcomes congressional oversight” and that it provides all detainees with comprehensive medical care as well as proper meals and living conditions.
Dean said Moshannon Valley appeared to be clean and spacious during her trip Wednesday. The medical unit was active — unlike a larger facility in Dilley, Texas that, after she visited earlier this year, she called “inhumane” for its lacking treatment of both adults and children.
But Dean said she questioned what the facility would look like if she had not announced her visit ahead of time, and she was not dissuaded from her position that the facility should be closed.
“This administration has just so successfully, cancerously dehumanized certain populations that we warehouse them now,” Dean said. “And we allow others to profit from it using our taxpayer dollars.”
GEO Group referred a request for comment to ICE, which did not immediately respond.
Dean said she was particularly alarmed that the GEO Group’s contract with ICE, as well as Republican-sponsored federal budget language, both appear to incentivize filling detention center beds rather than targeting those charged with violent crimes, as Trump pledged to do. She said a copy of the contract she obtained Wednesday explained GEO Group is paid $10 per individual every day they are detained, up to the first 800 detainees. The cost goes up to $40 per individual per day for every additional person detained, she said.
“It is so perverse. It says nothing about need, nothing about detaining the worst of the worst,” Dean said. “It says pick up as many people as you can, regardless of what they have done or haven’t done, so that every bed is charging and collecting from U.S. taxpayers to keep these people in that population.”
With Crawford County commissioners expected to vote in September on whether to renew the contract with ICE and GEO, Dean said she hopes the commissioners would choose not to extend the facility and instead shut it down.
Lee, who has gone further than other Pennsylvania Democrats by calling for elimination of ICE entirely, also said last month she hoped Moshannon Valley should close. One of the three Crawford County commissioners, meanwhile, said he was inappropriately denied entry to the facility and said he does believe the county should be part of the contract, WJAC reported.
Shutting down immigrant detention centers, however, is rare and difficult. More than 200 centers hold about 60,000 people, and Trump has been determined to increase capacity rather than reduce it.
Dean said there were 1,666 individuals detained at Moshannon Valley on Wednesday, which is more than the 1,417 that Deluzio reported on May 28. According to Deluzio, about 1,100 of those were classified as “low security.”
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