Unofficial detention sites in Pennsylvania held several children last year

ICE field offices across Pennsylvania come under scrutiny after being exposed as detention centers that hold children and seniors. 

A new report published by the Colorado Times Recorder found that five Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices across Pennsylvania are also acting as unofficial immigration detention sites known as “hold rooms.”

There are 170 hold rooms across the country, and these facilities are held to different standards than ICE’s official detention centers. They are not allowed to have beds or required to have toilets even though the federal government is able to detain someone for up to 72 hours. 

According to the report, more than 140,000 detainees, seniors and children included, were held throughout these facilities from January through October of last year.  

ICE has been using these hold rooms since 2011, and under previous administrations, the federal government had a time limit hold of 12 hours. 

“There are no buses that are coming here from the southern border. This is not a processing center for those types of individuals that are crossing the border. Nothing of that. These are strictly people that have been convicted of a crime where they have a warrant and they go after them and they detain them,” Lycoming County Commissioner Scott Metzger said in 2023 about ICE’s Williamsport field office. 

In Pennsylvania, these hold rooms are located in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Williamsport, York, and Pike County and had 22 children ranging from infants  to teenagers move through the facilities during those 10 months.. 

These hold rooms are supposed to let detainees go after 72 hours, but data shows that the number of detainees held longer increased from 281 instances under the previous president, Joe Biden, during his last 16 months in office, to more than 5,000 instances under President Donald Trump, in his first nine and a half months as president last year

At the Pennsylvania field offices, there were detainees held in the Philadelphia, York, and Pike County centers for 46 to 76 days, which is well above the federal government’s 72-hour rule. 

Since retaking office last year, the Trump administration claimed that they were only targeting immigrants with violent criminal records, but the data released by the Colorado Times Recorder shows that most of those taken to these facilities did not have a criminal record.