Democratic congressional representatives from the Philadelphia area are pressing for information regarding the contract and operations of Moshannon Valley Processing Center, the largest immigrant detention center in the Northeast.
The pressure comes as Clearfield County commissioners vote Tuesday to grant a six-month extension of a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and GEO Group, the private prison company that owns and operates the Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, detention center.
Under an Intergovernmental Service Agreement, ICE pays Clearfield County. The county then contracts with and pays GEO Group to operate the facility.
U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and fellow Pennsylvania House Democrats sent a letter late last week asking the county, ICE and GEO Group to provide financial documents regarding the current status of the contract and billing information.
“ICE is paying GEO, through the county, millions of dollars a month to detain people who, by and large, have no criminal record,” Scanlon told WHYY News. “So it raises a number of questions, including about why are people who are not a threat to the community and have no criminal record, why are they being placed in a prison setting? But also, is this a proper use of taxpayer dollars?”
Scanlon said she is also concerned based on what she learned during a congressional oversight visit in July, which indicated that the prison is “being run using the labor of people who may be held unconstitutionally or without due process.”
During the tour, she was told that there were just two full-time janitors for the facility, which can hold close to 2,000 people.
“When we asked, we were told that the folks who are being detained there are cleaning the bathrooms and their living quarters, etc.,” she said. “That was portrayed as voluntary, but how voluntary is it when you’re being held in a prison setting? Similarly, we were told by prison officials that they couldn’t run the place without using the detainee labor for cleaning, for laundry, for food service.”
That is common in private detention centers, Scanlon said, adding that she was told the company pays $1 a day for detainees’ labor.
“A large part of this administration’s push to engage in mass deportation is a claim that folks, immigrants who are here, are taking American jobs,” she said. “But here is an explicit instance where they are using immigrants to do work, unpaid work, in these private prison facilities, and then that means that the private prison companies reap more profit.”
“We’re concerned both about whether there are any kind of human rights abuses going on, and about whether taxpayer dollars are being used to line the pockets of private prison companies,” she added.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor GEO Group responded Monday to a request for comment.
The facility opened in 2006 as a federal prison. It was repurposed as an ICE detention center in 2021.
Advocates say most people detained by ICE in the Greater Philadelphia region are sent to Moshannon, the largest detention center in the Northeast, with a maximum capacity of 1,876.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, as of July 9, an average of 1,611 people are held at the facility each day.