Families may join case against center
The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has ruled that families formerly detained at the Berks County Residential Center have the right to participate in a pending legal challenge to the facility’s license to house children.
The Bern Township facility houses undocumented immigrants seeking asylum from their country of origin in an arrangement between the county and the Department of Homeland Security.
The county manages and pays for the operation, including about 60 workers, 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.
The future of the center was thrown into question in February 2016, when the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services denied renewal of the facility’s license to house children and moved to revoke it. The agency said the center was not being operated as a child residential center as the license intended.
The two facilities in Texas do not hold state licenses to house children, thus cannot keep them for more than 20 days.
The county appealed the DHS decision, and the center has been permitted to continue operating as that appeal moves through the legal system.
County officials have stood behind the center, saying it is well-run and safe, and that the people employed there genuinely care about the residents.
In April 2017, Administrative Law Judge David A. Dudley ruled against the state DHS decision to revoke the center’s license, saying it failed to provide substantial evidence against its continued operation.
Soon after, DHS elected to reconsider the ruling, and the case was later kicked back down to Dudley, where it remains.
After ongoing public pressure on the DHS and Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf to resolve the licensing issues, families who had been detained at the center filed a petition to intervene in the court proceedings.
Dudley denied the petition based, in large part, on the fact that the detainees who filed the petition no longer reside at the center.
Aldea — The People’s Justice Center, a collection of advocates representing the families in the lawsuit, appealed the decision.
The organization argued that detainees come and go in relatively short spans of time thereby making if difficult to maintain petitioners who are current detainees to litigate their claims.
Commonwealth Court on Tuesday sided with the families, finding that DHS erred in denying the petition to intervene.
“...Petitioners can persuasively argue that DHS is not adequately representing their interests,” Judge Bonnie Leadbetter wrote in the opinion. “Moreover, detainees are the ones personally suffering any negative consequences of their health, safety and well-being posed by the center operating contrary to law such that their direct interest could diverge from DHS’s more general interest in confirming that the center operates lawfully.”
Attorney Carol Anne Donohoe of Aldea applauded the ruling. She said the decision shows that DHS has not been adequately representing families who have been detained at the center.
“Through their inaction thus far, DHS has shown they cannot adequately and zealously represent those most affected by this litigation — the detained asylum-seeking mothers, fathers, and children,” she said in a press release issued on Wednesday.
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.
Among the claims against the center are a policy in effect until June 2017 that mandated children to shower with a parent in the communal washroom, a rule included in the center’s handbooks. The policy meant some juveniles ages 12 and younger were possibly showering near unrelated adults of the opposite sex.
Other accusations against the center include an institutional sexual assault of a detained mother (an employee was found guilty of the crime), denying appropriate medical and mental health care, and housing unrelated detainees of the opposite sex together.
ICE officials have repeatedly denied that residents have been mistreated.