BERN — For nearly a decade, groups of protesters would gather to chant and sing songs in front of the Berks County Residential Center, urging the release of the mothers and children seeking asylum.
The campaign to shut down the small immigration detention facility in Bern Township began in 2014 after reports that a guard had regularly sexually assaulted a 19-year-old Honduran mother. And it ceased in 2023, when the center closed after ICE ended its contract with the county.
What happened in between was a concerted pressure campaign on the federal and state government spearheaded by Shut Down Berks, a coalition of immigrant leaders, attorneys, members of the faith community, and more.
“There was an organized, intentional strategy that played out over many years,” said David Bennion, immigration attorney and executive director of Free Migration Project, an advocacy group. “There was an organizing element. There was a legal element. There was an advocacy element, trying to engage elected officials, communications. It wasn't one thing or another.”
Berks County is once again at the center of a debate over detention and deportation, although on a much larger scale. ICE purchased a warehouse in the county earlier this year, with plans to turn it into a 1,500-bed processing facility. A mega-detention center, capable of holding 7,500 people, is planned nearby.
Members of Shut Down Berks told Spotlight PA the fight will be radically different because of the scope of the project and the lack of local control.
“Berks was small. You could see what happens when you combine legal resources with community action, that you can render ICE completely ineffective,” said Bridget Cambria, an immigration attorney. “A massive detention center of 10,000 people? That strategy will not work because you can't get 10,000 people represented…”
“People will get lost in there, and they will get removed without the ability to actually defend their case.”
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Shutting down Berks
The Berks County Residential Center (BCRC) opened in 2001 as a family detention facility primarily holding mothers and children.
For more than a decade, it operated with fewer than 100 beds through an intergovernmental contract between Berks County and ICE, and was licensed as a child residential facility by the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services.
The federal government reimbursed the county for operating BCRC, an arrangement that provided Berks County $1.3 million in revenue annually, the Reading Eagle reported in 2019. (County Commissioner Christian Leinbach said the money was used to pay for the lease of the building and operations.)
Shut Down Berks used several tactics to pressure officials to close the center.
When Cambria, who also works for immigrant legal services nonprofit Aldea PJC, visited the facility for the first time in 2014, she noticed many families being held long term without counsel.
“There were like 40 different women that were there that had no lawyer,” Cambria said. “Nobody had a lawyer, so it was just strange that they had filled up this detention center and nobody was leaving, and they were there for months at one point.”
Aldea PJC started as an effort to provide legal representation to all the women inside BCRC. The org’s role was pivotal, not only because it helped detainees with asylum claims, but because it brought greater scrutiny to the conditions inside the facility.
Advocates and organizers also worked to bring public attention to BCRC and the experiences of the families detained there. At times, detainees led those efforts themselves.
In 2016, the movement gained broader visibility when a group of mothers — later known as “Las Madres de Berks” — held a hunger strike to protest their prolonged detention and the violation of the Flores settlement, a federal legal agreement that established that children can be held in the “least restrictive” licensed settings for no more than 20 days.
Twenty-two women refused to eat, with some saying they had been held for a year.
“We left our homes in Central America to escape corruption, threats, and violence. We thought this country would help us, but now we are locked up with our children in a place where we feel threatened, including by some of the medical personnel, leaving us with no one to trust,” the mothers wrote in an open letter to the Department of Homeland Security.
The campaign used art and media to highlight the stories of immigrant mothers detained at BCRC. Philadelphia-based artist Michelle Angela Ortiz painted public murals and filmed the documentary Las Madres de Berks.
The stories shared by detainees and attorneys inside BCRC caught the attention of a group of Carnegie Mellon psychiatrists and psychologists, who sent a letter to former Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration, citing studies on how detention traumatizes and harms children.
Cambria and Adriana Zambrano, programs coordinator for Aldea, recalled one incident involving a two-year-old girl who was vomiting blood while staff restricted phone access.
“These are things that we would constantly come to the Berks County Commissioners meetings to talk about,” Zambrano said. “I still have a bloody pillowcase.”
Another key strategy was pushing for BCRC to be stripped of its license.
Advocates argued BCRC should not be operating as a “child residential facility” because children were being subject to indefinite detention, in violation of Flores. Meanwhile, the county argued it did not have to comply with the Flores 20-day limit on detention because the facility was licensed through the state Department of Human Services .
The agency announced in January 2016 that it would not renew the facility’s license in February, arguing that it was not operating according to its license. Instead of serving as a “child residential facility,” the state said, BCRC was being used to detain immigrant families, including adults.
But Berks county appealed to get the license back and won in 2017. The state then requested a reconsideration of the appeal decision. While the license was in legal limbo, BCRC remained open until ICE decided to end the contract with the county in late 2022.
The fight over the license came to a standstill, but activists continued to call on Wolf, the state’s Democratic governor, to issue an emergency removal order to shut down the detention center. Wolf argued that an order would not be legally defensible because there was no immediate danger at the facility.
Pressure to close the facility intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, advocates filed a lawsuit seeking the release of families, arguing the Department of Human Services was not doing enough to protect families from the virus. A judge denied the request.
In 2021, after the Biden administration announced plans to end long-term family detention, BCRC began releasing families. It reopened briefly as a women-only facility — a move that angered longtime proponents of shuttering the center, who feared families would be separated and that there would be less oversight.
After years of sustained legal pressure and protests, ICE told county officials in 2022 that it would not renew its contract for BCRC. It closed the following year.
For some advocates who were part of the coalition, there was no single event or main reason that led to BCRC’s end.
“The protests were really important, because for decades, nobody knew that the facility was there,” Cambria said. “It also gave something for the people who were detained there to see … that they weren't alone. … I think it was very helpful over the years.”
Jasmine Rivera, an organizer with Shut Down Berks, attributed the closure to the group’s constant pressure.
“We never gave up. We may have adjusted how we did the work because of capacity being lower versus higher, and who was active in the coalition space, but we were always consistently doing that work,” Rivera said.
A bigger fight
ICE is now coordinating a return to the region — this time on a much larger scale. It plans to open a processing facility near Hamburg and a mega-detention center in Tremont that together could hold roughly 9,000 adults.
With thousands of detainees spread across two sites, local immigration attorneys and advocates might find it harder to represent clients, monitor conditions, and keep up the kind of legal and public pressure that created momentum for BCRC’s closure.
It also might be more difficult to fight the facilities since they will be run by the federal government.
“The big difference between the warehouses and Berks is that there is no one local entity that has the power to stop this … because there is no contract. There's no contract between the federal government and a local entity,” Rivera said.
Moshannon Valley Processing Center, for example, operates through two agreements that Clearfield County has with the federal government and a private prison company, a middleman position that will make the county $1 million over five years.
Christian Leinbach, chair of the Berks County Commissioners since 2011, told Spotlight PA there’s “no comparison” between BCRC and the newly proposed detention facilities, because the former was used solely to keep families together while seeking asylum. Leinbach also highlighted that BCRC had special programming for children, two education pods, and outdoor recreational spaces.
During a recent public meeting, Leinbach said “he’s proud” of how Berks County operated the family residential center, “in spite of the accusations made by protesters against it.”
His concerns about the proposed immigration processing facility in Upper Bern Township, he said, mainly center on lost tax revenue.
“These are not taxes that we were hoping to get. These are taxes that have been paid for the last several years and budgets that have been built on that,” Leinbach said. He also mentioned his concerns about the impact the facilities would have on Upper Bern’s water and sewage infrastructure.
Before the Department of Homeland Security purchased 3501 Mountain Road in Upper Bern, the vacant warehouse generated $199,620 annually in county property taxes, $31,229 in township taxes, and $597,110 for the Hamburg Area School District. These taxes will not apply to a federally owned facility.
Officials in Berks and Schuylkill Counties have asked the federal government to allow them access to the future facilities, “to ensure humane treatment.” Leinbach stressed the need to get commitments from ICE in writing regarding humane treatment and financial compensation for lost tax revenue.
“The ball is in their court to come back and say, here's what we propose … confirming humane treatment, and here's what we propose on the fiscal side,” Leinbach told Spotlight PA.
Community organizers and residents who are now rallying to oppose the return of ICE detention in the region are focused on how the proposed facilities could strain EMS resources, overload local water and sewage systems, and cause environmental harm.
For Celine Schrier, a Berks County community advocate who was part of Shut Down Berks, a forward-looking strategy requires community building across ideological lines, and focusing on basic quality of life issues like taxes, roads, and drinking water could be a way to achieve consensus.
“What’s going to sway a lot of people is like, this is taking hundreds of thousands of dollars out of their tax rolls, and they are already a pretty tax‑strapped community,” Schrier said.