Weeks after a federal appeals court blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from forcing members of Congress to give a seven-day notice to visit an immigration detention center, US Reps. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) and Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) made an unannounced visit to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County.
“ We came in unannounced to exercise our oversight responsibility, to show up unannounced and to inspect and get a tour,” Deluzio told reporters following the tour.
He added, “ We didn’t have staff who could interpret for us, and there are a significant number of Spanish speakers in this facility, as you can imagine, so it limits our ability to really do oversight.”
It was the first time members of Congress visited the facility. Lee was denied entry to Moshannon last year while conducting an oversight check with US Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D).
The Moshannon Valley Processing Center was originally a federal prison which was converted into a detention center. It is operated by the GEO Group and serves as the largest immigration detention facility in the northeastern US for the US Department of Homeland Security.
Since Moshannon opened in 2022, there have been three deaths inside the facility, and immigration advocates such as Jasmine Rivera, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, fear there will be more due to medical neglect.
”Our big fear right now is that another person is going to die because of how flagrant the medical neglect is, how subpar the food and water is,” Rivera said in an interview. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re mourning another life lost.”
Earlier this week, it was reported that Izzy Aly, an Egyptian national being held at the facility, has been suffering from Stage 3 kidney disease since January but was not informed about his condition for months after the fact.
Aly is in need of urgent medical attention after he was reportedly urinating blood on May 18 and has been denied treatment.
Moshannon is designed to hold up to 1,876 people and according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), there were 1,650 detainees being held there as of early April.
Last month, 100 people inside the center launched a hunger strike after a detainee started vomiting a green substance and was denied medical care. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson denied that a hunger strike was taking place at the time.
“ Those who operate Moshannon continuously tell a different story from what we’re hearing from dozens and dozens and dozens of community members, and what we’ve heard from hundreds of community members over the last five years,” Rivera said.
She added, “The narrative coming from those who operate Moshannon is vastly different from all of these community members who have been held there at different points of time.”
On Thursday, Deluzio attempted to meet with Randy Cordova Flores, a constituent of his who has been held at the facility since February. Cordova Flores was arrested during a traffic stop while having a pending asylum application and valid work authorization.
However, those inside the facility did not allow Deluzio to meet his constituents due to the short notice of the visit.
“I made the request once I was inside,” Deluzio said, and added, “The answer was ‘if it was a congressional visit with a certain amount of notice, that could happen.”
Like the overwhelming majority of those being held in immigration detention, Cordova Flores is being held despite not having a criminal record.
TRAC estimates that over 70% of the 60,000 immigrants being held in detention nationwide have no criminal record.
While inside the facility, Deluzio and Lee had a former detainee who was not fluent inEnglish to help translate for them, and Lee spoke about an interaction they had with a woman who was bleeding during her pregnancy and did not know the status of it.
“ We heard from one of the pregnant women who was bleeding in unit and who told us… that she might not know the status of her pregnancy right now,” Lee said.
