Nearly a decade of immigrant rights organizing bore fruit this week in Pennsylvania’s Berks County, where a federal immigration contract with the locality was officially terminated on Jan. 31. The end of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agreement shuts down the Berks County Residential Center, making it the fifth abusive facility to close under the Biden administration.
“Today we celebrate no more immigration prison in Berks County,” tweeted the Shut Down Berks Coalition. “The Berks County Detention Center in Leesport, PA is officially closed and ICE has completely vacated the facility.” The coalition had been working for eight years to shut down the facility, and said the closure showed “the power of an organized community.”
RELATED STORY: Last detained immigrant at soon-to-close Pennsylvania facility has been released, advocates confirm
Berks for many years detained asylum-seeking migrant families under pervasively abusive conditions. In 2016, a male worker was convicted of sexually assaulting a detained woman. ICE employee Daniel Sharkey “was the first detention center worker to be convicted of ‘institutional sexual assault,’ although advocacy groups and news outlets have widely lamented the issue that is common in U.S. prisons,” Philly Voice reported in 2020.
In a dual example of the unfairness faced by both migrants and sexual assault victims, Sharkey was sentenced to four months in prison, Philly Voice said. His victim, meanwhile, spent double that amount of time at Berks.
Children weren’t spared from the cruelty, either. In 2020, a little girl named Maddie and her dad were finally released after 250 days in detention. Maddie, 7, “had spent more time inside than any child currently held in the country’s three family detention centers,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time. Even short times in detention can be harmful to children. But the report said that following the family’s release, she seemed more worried about her dad than herself. “’Daddy, why are you crying?’ the child asked as her father wept after the release.”
It was the Biden administration that announced the following year that migrant families would no longer be detained at Berks. The two remaining family jails, both in Texas, would still remain open as “reception centers” where families will be held long enough to undergo COVID-19 testing. It was advocates’ hope that Berks would be shut down entirely, but the federal government kept it open as a detention center for adult migrant women. So the coalition continued fighting.
The Biden administration did the just thing the following year, when county officials were informed that the site’s contract would end come Jan. 31, 2023. But the site was emptied weeks ahead of schedule, when the final remaining detained woman walked out of the site’s doors on Jan. 10.
“This victory belongs to the immigrant families and women detained at Berks who shared their stories and demanded dignity, and to the organizers who never lost hope and never stopped fighting for immigrant families to be free and together,” Make the Road Pennsylvania member Flor González said in Truthout. Liliana Perez, who was detained with her daughter at Berks for more than a month, had previously said that news of the closure felt “like a dream.”
She said that her child was sick during their weeks in detention but was never given medical attention by staff, mirroring neglect described at other migrant family jails across the nation. One of the most heart-wrenching congressional testimonies in recent years came from Yazmin Juárez, who described how her toddler, Mariee, failed to receive proper medical care when they were detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center. The girl would die in a hospital just weeks after they were finally released.
“My Mariee died on May 10, 2018,” Juárez told lawmakers in 2019. “When I walked out of the hospital that day, all I had with me was a piece of paper with Mariee’s handprints in pink paint. The nurses made it for me the day before, as a Mother’s Day gift.”
Following Berk’s official closure, the Shut Down Berks Coalition said its associated social media account would go dormant, but encouraged supporters to continue following its members. Fights to close other facilities continue, after all. ”As we close this campaign and celebrate this historic victory, we also want to thank all of you who showed up and took action,” the coalition said. “It is the collective action of all of us that make these victories possible.”
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