Dems visit area immigration center
BERN TOWNSHIP >> It’s not like it is at the border.
After touring immigration detention centers at the southern border earlier this year, U.S. Reps. Madeleine Dean and Mary Gay Scanlon stopped by the Berks County Residential Center for a surprise visit Friday afternoon.
The facility houses illegal immigrants seeking asylum from their country of origin in an arrangement between the county and the Department of Homeland Security.
While the conditions at the Bern Township facility are far superior to those at the border, Dean and Scanlon said, the fact that asylum-seekers are being detained at all is wrong.
“A golden cage is still a cage,” Dean told a group of reporters after their two-hour tour had ended.
“The conditions we are seeing here are not the conditions we are seeing on the southern border,” Scanlon added. “While it’s clearly bad for the mental health of children to be detained at all, at least there are beds and classrooms here so it is not the same situation.”
Berks manages and pays for the operation, including 59 staff, and is reimbursed by the federal government. In return, Immigration and Customs Enforcement pays to
lease office space and provides about $1.3 million in revenue annually to the county.
The center can hold a maximum of 96 people. It is one of three ICE residential centers in the United States with the two larger facilities located in Texas.
While ICE officials have said residents are free to leave at any time, the center has denied requests from immigration lawyers to have residents join protests at the edge of the property in the past. And the 2010 intergovernmental services agreement between the county and the federal government has a provision on the apprehension of escapees.
Dean, who represents the 4th District in Montgomery County that includes a small portion of Berks in the Boyertown area, said the purpose of the visit was to bear witness to the immigration policies being carried out by the Trump administration and shine a light on what she believes are immoral situations.
What they heard
Dean said her goal was to speak with families housed at the center. The Montgomery County lawmaker explained that since she had toured the facility last year as a state representative she was familiar with the conditions should would find there — but not the stories about the people.
“The stories of where they come from and the fear they fled from were compelling,” she said.
Dean said that through her communications director, who translated the conversations, she was able to speak with 21 of the 25 people representing 13 families being detained.
She spoke about one man who told her that he had fled with his 16-yearold daughter after being threatened by gang members that they would kidnap her and sell her to sex traffickers. Dean said the man was surprised they had not been welcomed when they arrived in the United States after they told authorities why they had fled.
Scanlon, who represents the 5th District that includes Delaware County as well as parts of Philadelphia and Montgomery counties, spoke about one woman who told her she was detained despite her compliance with court orders. She said the woman was outfitted with an ankle bracelet that monitored her activity and she had dutifully showed up to hearings regarding her asylum status. But when she arrived at her third hearing she was arrested and sent to the Berks center.
What they learned
Dean said the visit illustrated two points: the inhumanity of the policies of the Trump administration by incarcerating people at the border or detaining them at facilities like the Berks center and the incompetence of the administration to deal with what she believes is a true humanitarian crisis.
“This is a broken system,” she said. “Immigrants seeking refuge have rights. They are not criminals.”
Scanlon said the fact that there are 96 beds but only 25 people at the facility is evidence to her that the crisis on the southern border is part of a manufactured escalation under the Trump administration intended to rile up the anti-immigrant base and push through more inhumane policies — including proposed rule changes like making migrants claim asylum at a previous country while en route to the United States.
“The country has experienced previous surges and we haven’t seen this kind of activity,” the Delaware County lawmaker said.
ICE officials said in April that the low number of people held at the center is due to the influx in illegal crossing at the border, which ties federal resources and makes transporting asylum-seekers more difficult.
Both women, who sit on the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, have called for those seeking asylum to be released to family members or sponsors already in the country. They have also asked that the administration work to address the backlog in the immigration courts.
What they are going to do
Dean said she supports the effort to shut down the center and promised that she would reach out to Gov. Tom Wolf to talk about what the state could do to make that happen.
“I have grave concerns about what I saw,” she said. “The fact that these people don’t really know where they are in this process. And I worry very, very much for the mental health of the children in particular.”
The center has long been in the crosshairs of local and national groups calling on the governor to issue an emergency removal order for the families in the center. They argue asylum-seekers should not be detained and instead released to family or friends while awaiting adjudication of their cases. They have also claimed those held at the center are kept in poor conditions.
But the governor has said in the past that the situation at the center doesn’t warrant such an order.
County officials point out that federal and state officials inspect the facility regularly to ensure that the families there are being treated well and that the children have access to educational resources.
Scanlon said the county is also benefiting from the detainment of these families. She said the fact that the county and private corporations are making money off the warehousing of people is disturbing.
“We have to recognize the perverse influences in a policy like this,” she said.