LEESPORT, Pa. –– The Berks County Residential Center is a long brick building tucked back from a quiet highway with rolling green lawns on both sides, a 15-minute drive from Reading. With little signage to indicate that it’s there, the facility is hard to distinguish from the nursing home next door –– but it could represent a blueprint for extended detention of immigrant families.
When Berks opened in 2001 as the nation’s first residential immigration center, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Executive Director Michael Pearson said the facility was meant to “keep families together,” billing it as a humane alternative to separating asylum-seeking parents from their children, which had been common practice.
But over the past four years, since the Obama administration reinstituted family detention to house families fleeing violence in Central America, the center — one of three family detention centers in the country — has been a site of controversy, with immigrants’ rights advocates alleging health and human rights abuses. In 2016, 22 detained mothers went on a 2-week hunger strike, saying their children had become suicidal after over a year in detention. The same year, a guard at the center was convicted of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old asylum seeker who had been detained with her 3-year-old son for 7 months.
The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services revoked the 96-bed facility’s license to house children in 2016, but the county appealed, and the center continues to operate as the legal battle goes on.
Now, as President Donald Trump’s June 20 executive order ended family separation but called for the indefinite detention of families apprehended at the border, Berks looks to be a model for American policy toward immigrant families. Currently it is the only detention center where parents and children can be detained long-term while they await interviews to determine whether they qualify for asylum.
The family detention centers in Karnes and Dilley, Texas, are both privately owned and bound by a 1997 federal District Court decision called the Flores Settlement Agreement that mandates that they can hold children for only 20 days.
Immigration attorneys say the Pennsylvania facility, which is operated by Berks County through a contract with ICE, is operating in violation of Flores: A 2015 District of Columbia District Court decision interpreting the agreement says children can only be held in a “non-secure” facility, and detainees in Berks are not allowed to leave. ICE confirmed that detainees are not free to leave, but say the facility is still “un-secured.”
Detainees whose cases take too long in Texas are transferred to Pennsylvania, and some women in 2016 were detained in Berks for nearly two years, according to Bridget Cambria, an attorney at the facility.
Over the past four years, Ms. Cambria and other lawyers who work at Aldea – The People’s Justice Center, an organization of legal advocates doing pro bono work at Berks, have represented more than 780 clients in the facility.
Ms. Cambria is from Berks, and first worked at the center as a counselor when she got out of college, where she’d studied child psychology.
But the job wasn’t what she’d imagined: She spent her time counting the residents and standing guard while they showered or went to class.
“A counselor counsels. A guard guards,” she said. “I was guarding.”
The lack of legal representation for the children stranded at the center disturbed her. She went to law school and came back to give legal help to those detained at Berks.
Most of the 48 people currently detained in the facility are Central American fathers and their children, many of whom are from groups that speak indigenous languages, according to Jackie Kline, another attorney with Aldea. Most have only been there for up to a few weeks, she said, and like most of the people who have been detained in Berks, have family members to sponsor them already in the United States. ICE officials would not confirm the number of people detained.
Inside, the detention center looks not unlike the nursing home that used to occupy the building. Security footage from 2014 shows common areas with couches and child-size chairs, sterile white hallways, and a chapel with wooden pews. State officials who visited Monday described seeing medical facilities, including a dentist’s office, as well as rooms where detainees sat watching TV. Visible from the outside is a small playground and a soccer field, where a few detained men walked around Monday morning.
ICE officials said the facility includes a library and a toddler playroom, and that the center hosts movie nights and art and music classes. They said that teachers from the Berks County Intermediary Unit offer classes from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and that detainees are regularly taken on field trips to local shopping centers and amusement parks.
“Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment the families arrive and throughout their entire stay at the facility,” a spokesman said.
Reports from detainees paint a different picture.
In 2015, a 3-year-old girl detained in the center vomited blood for three days before her mother was allowed to take her to the hospital, Ms. Kline said. The Guardian reported that when the girl’s mother asked for medical assistance, nurses at Berks simply told her to have the girl drink water. In 2016, The Guardian also reported that a 5-year-old girl detained in the center contracted shigellosis, a contagious disease that led to weeks of cramps and diarrhea while it went untreated.
ICE officials said that detainees have regular access to therapy, support groups, and mental-health check-ups and that 40 percent of the facility’s staff speaks “fluent or conversational Spanish.” But Ms. Cambria said the psychiatrist present does not speak Spanish — in fact, only one employee in the center is fluent, she said. Ms. Cambria said many detainees do not understand Spanish or English, but no employees speak an indigenous language, ICE confirmed.
Detainees also report being awakened every 15 minutes throughout the night by center employees who shine flashlights on their faces to count them.
Officials said that the checks are required by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, and that the lights are directed at the floor or ceiling.
As family detention has come into the national spotlight this month, activists around the state have rallied to put pressure on Gov. Tom Wolf to shut down the facility. A group called the Shut Down Berks Coalition hosts weekly webinars about the center and has hosted rallies outside the governor’s office in Philadelphia. They recently posted videos of four former detainees asking the governor to take action.
On June 21, the Philadelphia City Council approved a resolution calling on the governor to issue an Emergency Removal Order to shut the center down.
Mr. Wolf’s spokespeople have said that he would like to see the detention center closed but does not have the authority to shut it down. Regardless, they said, they have not seen violations that merit the action.
“The Department of Human Services conducts regular unannounced inspections and has not found grounds for an emergency removal order,” the office wrote in a statement on June 28.
Lawyers at Temple University's Sheller Center for Social Justice say the governor does have the power to issue an emergency removal order, and that the conditions at the center warrant it. Pennsylvania law prohibits the operation of a facility without a license, and Berks is not a federal facility, they said. The state has previously issued emergency removal orders for children who were left unsupervised at a daycare center and patients at a nursing home where employees were stealing medication.
"The conditions at Berks similarly constitute an immediate and serious danger to the detained children and their families," they wrote in a 2016 memo.
Ms. Kline said she thinks the governor is wary of creating conflict with the federal government.
“He’s going to pass the buck and act like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing I can do about it,’” she said. “He absolutely has the power to act in shutting it down.”
Berks County operates and finances the facility, which employs 66 people, and is reimbursed by the federal government for the full $8.3 million it costs them annually, according to Berks Chief Financial Officer Robert J. Patrizio Jr. ICE pays the county an additional $1.1 million per year as a “building use charge,” revenue that makes up less than 1 percent of the county’s budget. While ICE leases office space in the building, that fee is for use of the entire facility, Mr. Patrizio said.
Berks County commissioners Christian Leinbach and Kevin Barnhardt declined to comment for this story, but Mr. Leinbach told the Reading Eagle last week that the county is committed to keeping the center open, and not because the county profits from it.
“We’re fighting this on principle. Our people have done a great job. Our client, in this case the federal government, has been very happy,” he told the paper.
State Sen. Judy Schwank, who was one of county commissioners when it opened, visited the center on Monday. She said the detainee she spoke to, a father from Honduras detained with his 3-year-old son, had no complaints about his treatment.
“It certainly seems like people are being given the basics of life there,” she said. “They’re cared for, they’re getting access to legal assistance, they’re getting food and medical care.”
Other public officials who toured the facility the same day were more critical.
Christopher Rabb, who represents Philadelphia and was one of 24 state representatives who sent a letter to the governor on June 21 urging him to close the facility, said he was disturbed by what he saw.
“Why lock them up for weeks at a time if they all have representation and they all have someone they can go to in the States?” he said. “My issue is structural, in how we allow local governments to profit off of human misery. It doesn’t keep us safer.”
Mr. Rabb said the detainee he spoke to, a Honduran father who had been detained with his teenage son for over two months, broke down crying during the interview. The visit convinced him that the U.S. should end family detention.
According to a 2017 report by the Homeland Security inspector general, the federal Family Case Management Program, which allowed nearly 1,000 asylum seekers to pursue their cases outside detention with monitoring and guidance, had a perfect record for court hearings and a 99 percent appearance rate at immigration check-ins. The program cost $36 per participant a day, according to the AP –– compared to the $318 that the Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 budget proposal lists as the cost of a bed in a family detention center. The Trump administration ended the program last year.
Last week, in the executive order that ended family separation, Mr. Trump ordered the attorney general to file a request to modify the Flores agreement to allow indefinite family detention in facilities beyond Berks. Soon after, ICE issued a notice that it may seek up to 15,000 beds to detain immigrant families. Together, the facilities in Berks, Karnes, and Dilley hold just over 3,000.
Adriana Zambrano, a legal volunteer with Aldea, said she worries that those up in arms about family separation will lose interest when families are reunited in indefinite detention.
“We’re all falling for it,” she said. “Families belong together and free.”
Correction, posted July 10, 2018: A previous version of this story did not reflect the legal dispute over whether or not the Berks County Residential Center is operating in accordance with the Flores Settlement Agreement.
Annie Rosenthal: arosenthal@post-gazette.com or on Twitter: AnnieRosenthal8.
First Published: July 9, 2018, 11:30 a.m.
Updated: July 10, 2018, 5:21 p.m.
