By Renée Feltz
This article was originally published by Truthout
An ICE jail in rural Pennsylvania has been accused of medical neglect, providing unsafe water, and serving spoiled food.
As people defy a police crackdown and flock to support hunger strikers at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, a campaign is growing in rural Pennsylvania to shut down ICE’s largest immigration jail on the East Coast, where a man with advanced kidney failure worries he may become the fourth person held there to die in the past three years.
“No treatment was given to me whatsoever when clear blood was spotted when using the restroom,” Izzy Aly said in a statement read by county resident Sherilyn Sheetsat the bimonthly Clearfield County commissioners meeting last Tuesday. Sheets then played an audio recording of Aly, pleading with the commissioners in his own voice: “There is no question that my situation is precarious to say the least. Please do something.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Aly in December at the Philadelphia International Airport as he flew home to Florida from a U.S. Customs and Immigration Services-approved visit to Egypt to handle his recently deceased father’s estate. He had attended school in the Orlando area for about a decade and had a pending green card application, but was taken to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center. The 1,876-bed ICE jail opened three years ago in a former prison that now holds mostly asylum seekers and longtime U.S. residents. Commissioners in this Republican-leaning county, which backed Trump by 75 percent in 2024, will vote by September on whether to renew its $268 million, five-year contract for the detention hub with ICE and private-prison corporation GEO Group, and their meetings have been packed with people calling on them to cancel it.
“Clearfield County should not and cannot be complicit in suffering,” said the second person to comment at a May 26 meeting, Tony D’Orazio, chair of the Clearfield County Libertarian Party and board member of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania.
D’Orazio told Truthout he learned about Moshannon last year and attended his first meeting Tuesday when he read a social post by Aly’s friend in Florida and realized Aly was detained “right here in my county, which got me looking into it a whole lot more.”
Opponents of the Moshannon facility have traveled from around the state in recent months to attend the meetings, but for the first time last week, the county solicitor refused to let them speak, citing time constraints.
“This has become a convenient soap box to address federal immigration issues,” complained Commissioner Tim Winters, who is chair of the board, at the May 26 meeting before motioning to adjourn.
While Winters has called Moshannon “a major economic driver,” D’Orazio argues it has had a “negative impact on tourism” since “people are coming to the region to protest this facility, not necessarily to see the beauty of Clearfield County. It’s also expensive.”
Clearfield’s three commissioners told PennLive they toured Moshannon “two or three times over the last five years,” but “have not spoken with any incarcerated people during those preplanned visits.”
Democratic Congressmembers Summer Lee and Chris Deluzio made an unannounced visit Tuesday to Moshannon, where Rep. Lee said they were granted a “pretty sanitized tour” of the women’s unit and saw at least two people held there who are pregnant.
Officials denied Rep. Deluzio’s request to meet with Randy Cordova Flores, a Peruvian father and asylum seeker arrested in February at a traffic stop in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Last August, Rep. Lee was turned away from a visit after she sent an inquiry about medical care for another asylum seeker, Maklim Gomez Escalante, who was detained there after being hospitalized for heart problems.
As the lawmakers briefed journalists on their visit, they stood in front of a billboard showing the “cost to detain one immigrant in Philipsburg for a year” is about $48,000, compared to about $22,000 to “educate one child.”
A note at the bottom of the graphic explained it was, “Created and paid for by local residents, clergy and advocates,” and listed a website — moshannonvalleyprocessingcenter.com — that offers “Ten Ways to Take Action,” including: “Attend a Commissioner Meeting.”
The barbed wire-surrounded prison at 555 Geo Drive in Philipsburg briefly shut down in 2021 when the Biden administration instructed federal prisons to end their use of private prisons. It reopened later that year, when it contracted with ICE with help from the Moshannon Valley Economic Development Partnership. Leonard Oddo, the current warden of Moshannon, is a member of the Partnership.
Since then, complaints about conditions have been steady. Most recently, about 100 people incarcerated at Moshannon started a hunger strike in April to protest spoiled food and alleged medical neglect. About a week before Izzy Aly arrived in December, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir became the third person to die at the jail after ICE said he suffered “medical distress.” Abdulkadir was an Eritrean national and imam from Ohio whose federal habeas corpus petition and emergency motion pleading for his release to obtain adequate medical care were denied by a U.S. District judge.
Abdulkadir’s death while held at Moshannon along with those of Frankline Okpu and Chaofeng Ge, is evidence of “a systemic crisis,” said Zeynep Emanet, the civic engagement manager at CAIR Philadelphia, during a press conference last week by the Shut Down Detention Campaign to demand Aly’s immediate release “before another preventable tragedy occurs.”
Several members of the campaign are visiting people at Moshannon as part of a long-standing support network bottom-lined by Juntos, a Philadelphia-based immigrant-rights group.
“You actually get to look into their eyes while they’re telling you about one of the most traumatic moments in their lives, when ICE took them, and how they’ve been coping with that this whole time,” Adrianna Torres-Garcia, co-director of the Free Migration Project, told Truthout last week, after she made the four-hour drive from Philadelphia to the rural jail.
Torres-Garcia said people they met during their most recent visit told them the drinking water at the jail is brown and “doesn’t taste good,” echoing similar complaints by others, including Aly, who said a nurse told him to drink more water when he complained of abdominal pain.
Joining the group for her second visit was Bobbi Erickson, who lives in neighboring Jefferson County and co-founded Indivisible Mayday. She told Truthout people at the jail lack privacy, as they practically have to yell during visits to be heard over the top of a plexiglass barrier that separates them from visitors.
“I asked the man I was visiting with, ‘How is the food?’,” Erickson recalled. “He responded, ‘bad,’ and the guard right over his shoulder said, ‘Tell her it’s good.’”
“His main question to me was, ‘Why am I here?” Erickson said. “The only thing I could tell him is money, because there’s some rich CEO getting richer.”
Back in Florida, friends of Aly report he has lost his apartment, car, and even his pet cat while in detention. J Mark Barfield is coordinating a movement to “Help Izzy Get His Life Back,” after volunteering with him for about seven years in Florida’s Libertarian Party.
“He last messaged me on December 22, saying he was about to board the airplane, and I messaged him several times saying, ’Where are you? Are you home yet?’ And I didn’t hear from him,” Barfield told Truthout. By February, Aly was able to obtain Barfield’s number and called him seeking help.
“He is frequently outspoken against unfair practices and what he sees as injustice,” Barfield noted, “so if anything, it may be a bit ironic that he’s suffering through the very thing that he fights so hard against.”
Barfield said Aly told him the water at Moshannon “frequently has a yellow hue to it,” with white flecks, a “coppery taste” and a “metallic odor” at times.
Erickson told Truthout she saw a large water storage tank at Moshannon “that is clearly in disrepair.”
When asked about the water quality and condition of the water tank at its facility, a GEO Group representative said in a statement to Truthout that “our support services are monitored by ICE and if “issues are identified, we quickly resolve all of ICE’s concerns as required by ICE’s Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan.” The representative claimed that access to “off-site medical specialists, imaging facilities, Emergency Medical Services, and local community hospitals is also provided when needed.”
As Aly marked the start of his fifth month in detention, he told Barfield his “pain is growing more acute.”
Across the country in California, complaints about poor food and lack of medical care prompted at least 20 people to launch a hunger strike in May at the GEO Group-run Adelanto ICE Processing Center, and protests in support of hunger strike launched Memorial Day at Delany Hall continue as well. Five of the men who launched the April hunger strike at Moshannon were put in solitary confinement.
D’Orazio and Erickson say they will attend the next Clearfield County Commissioners meeting next week once again to urge them to cancel the Moshannon contract instead of renewing it.
“Seeing that we have these facilities that make it easy to separate people from their families and from the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in our Constitution, not just to citizens, but to everybody on our shores, is really disheartening,” D’Orazio said, “but what really brings me hope is that there are so many people willing to speak up and say it’s wrong.”
When Erickson and others were refused a chance to participate in public comments during the last meeting, they stood and turned their backs as commissioners continued with old business. Erickson thinks people coming to speak from around the state have not been disruptive and urged commissioners to “read the Constitution.”
“I’m hyperfocused on Moshannon,” Erickson told Truthout, “which I think is what everyone should do. If there is an ICE detention facility near you, find out who’s running it, find out how you shut it down, and start organizing immediately.”
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please maintain all links and credits in accordance with our republishing guidelines.
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