Two hundred people gathered last Sunday outside the Berks County Residential Center in Leesport, calling for the facility to be shut down.
The activists waved across the road at detainees –– parents and children seeking asylum in the U.S., who watched from a fenced-in field next to the detention center. Minutes into the event, 17 protesters clad in white formed a circle and sat down on the road, blocking the facility’s entrance. As they waited for the 20 local police officers who arrived to arrest them, they read statements from former detainees.
“For more than 600 days we were there and we have seen the reality of how the center works and it is not a safe house. It is a prison,” read one statement, by a woman named Sofia who was held in the facility with her son in 2016. “My ask to the governor of Pennsylvania, is please, he has the power, he can call to have the center closed. He should do it so that no mother, no child, no father has to go through the suffering we went through in that place.”
This summer, in Texas, California, Oregon and Virginia, county governments have terminated lucrative contracts to detain immigrants amid public outcry over the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy.
But in Berks County, Pa., local officials remain committed to operating the Berks County Residential Center, one of three family detention centers in the country and the only one where families have been held long-term, even as a growing movement of activists calls for the governor to shut it down.
The 96-bed facility in Eastern Pennsylvania, which currently houses 24 families, became a target for local activism soon after the Obama administration began using it to house mothers and children fleeing violence in Central America in 2014.
Detainees –– some held for nearly two years –– reported widespread medical neglect and abuse. Public outcry ramped up in 2016, when the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services revoked the center’s childcare license but the state allowed it to continue to operate through an ongoing appeals process. That year, a guard was convicted of raping a 19-year-old woman from Guatemala who was detained with her 3-year-old son. In 2016, 22 mothers went on a hunger strike when their children became suicidal after over a year in detention.
But the protests did not reach national attention until this summer, when President Donald Trump’s policy of separating and detaining immigrant children and their parents prompted widespread outrage.
Since then, the Berks center has become a focal point for state activism against Mr. Trump’s immigration policy: the Shut Down Berks Coalition has held rallies outside the governor’s office in Philadelphia and hosts weekly webinars to educate people about Berks. Prominent local musicians hosted a benefit concert this month to support their efforts. Church groups sponsor a vigil in front of the center each month. On June 21, the Philadelphia City Council approved a resolution calling for the governor to issue an Emergency Removal Order to release the detainees.
The governor’s office has said that it does not have the authority to do that and has not seen conditions that would merit the action, though it has urged the federal government to shut the center down.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement reimburses Berks County for operating the detention center and pays the county an additional $1.1 million annually as a “building use charge” –– a profit that makes up less than 1 percent of the county’s budget, according to Berks County’s chief financial officer. The facility employees 66 county residents.
At a July 12 meeting, county commissioners said they don’t appreciate the recent focus on Berks from politicians and the media.
“I’m just really getting tired of all this attention on the BCRC. I know there are some horrific conditions in other facilities in other states and I’m not here to talk about that,” said Commissioner Kevin Barnhardt. “If you have a problem with the law then you need to take it up with your federal lawmakers. This is not something for the county or the state to change the federal immigration laws.”
He said that the county runs “a real first class operation here.”
On July 9, federal District Judge Dolly Gee denied the federal government’s request to extend the amount of time it can detain children in an unlicensed facility. She upheld the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 decision that mandates that children can only be held in detention for more than 20 days if the facility is licensed and “unsecured.”
As the only facility in the country with a state license, Berks has routinely housed families for months at a time, taking transfers from the two privately owned family detention centers in Texas, according to Bridget Cambria, a lawyer who represents families inside.
But activists say Berks has been operating in violation of Flores, arguing that it is in fact a secure facility with its license in limbo. A sign in front of the building says it is a “secure property,” and detainees, who do not face criminal charges, are not allowed to leave.
"If PA DHS or Berks County is currently claiming that the families are free to leave, we will gladly send transportation to pick them up and take them to sponsors who are waiting and willing to take them in,” said David Bennion, a Philadelphia-based attorney who has represented women detained in the facility. “Otherwise, they are lying if they say Berks is non-secure."
ICE officials confirmed that detainees are not free to leave, but said that the facility is still “non-secure.”
Following Judge Gee’s decision, the Trump administration –– struggling to reunite separated families by the court-ordered deadline –– announced it would move to a policy of releasing families of children under 5 with ankle monitors to pursue their cases in the community. But it appears that families who were not separated will remain in detention, and in June, the administration called for expanding capacity for family detention by five times.
Activists say that’s a bad idea.
Tonya Wenger and Pat Uribe-Lichty, members of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Berks County, started visiting detainees in Berks in 2016. During those visits, they said, they witnessed the psychological effects of detention on children: a young boy who did not cry when he hurt himself because he feared he would get in trouble; a young girl whose trust in her mother’s authority eroded after she saw guards scold the woman.
“The trauma that the families are dealing with is not just the trauma of what they’ve been through to cross the border, you know. It’s what ICE, the institution, is putting them through,” said Ms. Wenger.
“Some people have claimed, ‘Oh, well it’s taking care of them.’ It’s ridiculous because it’s money that should go into resources that they need when they’re waiting in communities,” said Sandra Fees, minister of the Unitarian church. “The point is that there are much better ways for this money to be spent, to support these families, and the criminalization of them is what the problem is, at every stage.”
Opponents of the detention center have proposed other uses for the building to keep the county from suffering if it were shut down. In a July 16 editorial, the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested turning it into a state-funded drug treatment facility. They reported than more than 85 people have died of heroin or fentanyl overdoses in Berks County each of the last two years.
For now, the activists have their hopes pinned on the governor, who they insist does have the power to release those detained in Berks.
“No matter what, whether the national attention focuses on something else, we’re not stopping,” said Jasmine Rivera, an organizer with the Shut Down Berks Coalition. “Pennsylvanians aren’t going to unlearn this and this coalition will continue to fight as long as that prison is open.”
Annie Rosenthal: arosenthal@post-gazette.com or on Twitter: AnnieRosenthal8.
First Published: July 22, 2018, 3:50 a.m.
