UPPER BERN \u2014 Roughly 100 people protested last weekend outside the municipal building in the small Berks County township where ICE wants to convert a warehouse into an immigration detention center.<\/p>\n
The gathering \u2014 the first protest near the warehouse since it was purchased \u2014 was planned by Allison Herr and Quentin Boussard, a couple who attend Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster.<\/p>\n
Herr told Boussard she felt hopeless about ICE\u2019s plans, and he suggested they do something, she told Spotlight PA. They used word of mouth, social media and door-knocking to get the word out about the event.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if there\u2019s no direct impact today, so many people met others who feel the same way and will go home lighter and more hopeful,\u201d Herr said.<\/p>\n
![\"ICE](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screenshot-2026-02-25-184425.png\")
Roughly 100 people gathered at Upper Bern Township\u2019s municipal building on Feb. 21 to protest a planned ICE detention center. (Credit: Ann Rejrat for Spotlight PA)<\/p>\n
On Feb. 2, the Trump administration quietly finalized the purchase of a nearly 520,000-square-foot vacant warehouse, formerly known as the Hamburg Logistics Center<\/a>. Upper Bern Township officials and residents said they were blindsided.<\/p>\n Linda Alspach, a lifelong township resident, said the area simply can\u2019t handle the infrastructure demands; a concern she noted is bipartisan. State and township officials say the plan could overwhelm the sewer system and wastewater treatment plant, as well as burden emergency personnel such as firefighters.<\/p>\n A statement from the township also noted that it has no public water system. As Spotlight PA recently reported, state officials say the vacant warehouse is designed to draw from an on-site water well and a system not designed to deal with the level of anticipated demand.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is our community and our concern,\u201d Alspach said.<\/p>\n For about two hours on Saturday, Berks County organizers from different groups and Upper Bern residents talked about ways to get involved. No public officials spoke. State Police remained a block away observing the protest.<\/p>\n Katie Jones, a 40-year-old Reading resident and lead organizer of Indivisible Berks, a group devoted to civic action, believes opposition must include influencing lawmakers.<\/p>\n \u201cI am very aware that these warehouses are places between major Latino populations,\u201d Jones said, referring to nearby Allentown and Reading.<\/p>\n First-time event organizers Herr and Boussard said they learned a lot from the demonstration, which solidified their belief that anyone can make a difference.<\/p>\n \u201cChange doesn\u2019t have to be just a city thing,\u201d Herr said. \u201cEven in the smallest of towns, people still care enough to do something.\u201d<\/p>\n BEFORE YOU GO\u2026\u00a0If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at\u00a0spotlightpa.org\/donate<\/a>. Spotlight PA is funded by\u00a0foundations and readers like you<\/a>\u00a0who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Ann Rejrat for Spotlight PA This story was produced by\u00a0the Berks County bureau of Spotlight PA, an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,58032,2443,741,2857,28,50,4525,128,130,129,3857,12264,20354],"class_list":{"0":"post-123564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-reading","8":"tag-berks-county","9":"tag-controversy","10":"tag-ice","11":"tag-immigration","12":"tag-infrastructure","13":"tag-pennsylvania","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-protest","16":"tag-reading-city","17":"tag-reading-city-headlines","18":"tag-reading-city-news","19":"tag-trump","20":"tag-upper-bern-township","21":"tag-warehouse"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}