Editorial voice from elsewhere
A Berks County facility that rakes in millions of federal dollars annually to function as a jailhouse for federally detained children and parents should be shut down. Today.
Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, concerned about conditions at the Berks County Residential Center in Leesport – essentially, a prison for families – has made repeated requests to tour the facility. The requests have been denied and without explanation, according to DePasquale.
What are they trying to hide?
The Berks County Center is one of three such facilities in the United States used by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to detain families that either are seeking asylum in the United States or who entered the country illegally.
The 96-bed center has been under scrutiny for years but has been able to hang on, barely, to its state operating license.
Gov. Tom Wolf has said he’d like to see the center shuttered but claims he doesn’t have the legal firepower to get the job done. Now comes DePasquale, who held a press conference Dec. 11 to turn a public spotlight – again – on the center and its function, which amounts to a jail for children and their parents, not one of whom faces a single criminal charge.
Meantime, Berks County continues to fill its coffers with the proceeds from this suspect, if not immoral, enterprise. The federal government pays $12 million annually to run the facility – a $1.3 million profit for Berks County. The center employs about 60 people. The profit, the employment: shameful, ill-gotten gains.
“No one being held at the Berks facility is facing any criminal charges, but the center still essentially functions as a jail in which adults and children, sometimes mere babies, are detained,” DePasquale commented. At that point, one 6-year-old had been in custody at the facility for 167 days.
Time will tell that Berks County and Pennsylvania and the United States are on the wrong side of history. There are better ways to “detain” people seeking asylum in America. Detention facilities are not the way. And this particular facility in Berks County has a particularly troubled history.
Immigrants’ rights advocates allege systemic health and human rights abuses. In 2016, 22 detained mothers at the center went on a two-week hunger strike, saying their children had become suicidal after more than a year in detention. The same year, a guard at the center was convicted of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old asylum seeker who had been detained with her 3-year-old son for seven months. The center faced revocation of its license but that has been forestalled by a county appeal.
Meanwhile, DePasquale contends, the center is in violation of a federal court settlement that requires the release of children being held at a secured facility who have been caught on the border within 20 days if there are relatives in the United States to whom they can be released.
It is inhumane, expensive and illogical to detain the Berks County asylum seekers. They seek refuge in this country. That makes them likely to show up for court proceedings on their asylum applications. They should be released into the community with some oversight measures, as well as some support systems, in place. They should be treated with dignity and concern in the fashion Americans would wish to be treated should Americans ever seek asylum from another country. Community-based options should be established for these families as they wend their way through unreasonably lengthy immigration proceedings. These people could become the next generation of American citizens.