HARRISBURG — As the Trump administration ramps up efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, advocates in Pennsylvania worry that existing civil rights and safety problems at the state’s largest federal detention center will get worse.
Known problems at Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County include wrongful placement in solitary confinement, along with denial of adequate and timely language interpretation or medical care services.
“These are not people serving their time for some sort of crime. They’re in detention essentially to facilitate the processing of their case,” said Jennifer Lee, an associate professor at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law who supervised a report alleging abuses at Moshannon.
Detentions in Pennsylvania are already surging. In recent weeks, ICE arrested nearly 20 people in Norristown, the Montgomery County seat, and detained 17 workers who had been restoring a fire-damaged building in Bethlehem, in the Lehigh Valley.
Many of these people will likely be sent to Moshannon.
As the largest federal detention facility not located in the South, it receives most of the people ICE arrests in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, according to Sarah Paoletti, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Transnational Legal Clinic, which represents asylum seekers.
Here’s what you need to know about this critical, much-scrutinized facility.
What is Moshannon, and how is it run?
Moshannon wasn’t always an immigrant detention facility.
It opened as a federal prison in 2006. Four years later, a private corporation, GEO Group, began operating the facility. The private prison closed in March 2021, and reopened in September of that year as an immigration detention facility after Clearfield County commissioners entered into two separate contracts — one with GEO Group, and one with ICE.
The ACLU sued Clearfield County at the time for allegedly violating the state's Sunshine Act while approving these contracts, and county officials have since faced consistent calls to terminate its agreements.
As of January, Moshannon is the ninth-largest facility of its kind in the country according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that tracks federal agency data, including on immigration.
ICE pays GEO Group nearly $3.5 million monthly to cover operational costs at the facility, according to estimates in an August 2024 report from the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple.
This kind of arrangement is common.
As of January, the 20 largest immigration and customs enforcement detention facilities are all privately owned. GEO Group alone operates more than a dozen federal civil immigration detention centers nationwide. The corporation has faced lawsuits in at least two other states, which allege that detainees in GEO Group prisons were threatened with solitary confinement if they didn’t participate in a prison work program, or were denied wages for their work.
GEO Transport Inc. buses, which are owned and operated by GEO Group, were in Philadelphia over the June 7 weekend, which could indicate more people were being transported to Moshannon, according to Patty Torres, co-executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road Pennsylvania.
Who ends up in Moshannon?
Paoletti, the director of the Transnational Legal Clinic at UPenn, told Spotlight PA she has seen people detained at Moshannon “for everything and nothing.”
Some people arrived in the U.S. with criminal convictions. Others were recent arrivals who crossed the U.S. southern border, received work authorization from the federal government, and were awaiting a hearing date for their asylum application when ICE detained them, she said.
As of June 1, nearly 44% of immigrants detained by ICE had no criminal record, according to TRAC, and those with criminal records often receive minor charges.
Torres said that one arrest in Pennsylvania that recently drew attention from immigration advocates was of Edwin Sanchez, a 23-year-old Colombian asylum seeker and Bethlehem resident who was detained at his routine check-in at a Philadelphia court.
Make the Road PA argues Sanchez should not have been detained and is supporting him through legal advocacy, raising awareness, and organizing for his release.
“Seeking asylum is a legal process, which Edwin put his faith in after fleeing violence,” Emily Lúa-Lúa, a lead organizer with Make the Road PA, wrote in a statement. “That process requires asylum seekers like Edwin to show up in person, and when Edwin showed up in good faith he was ambushed with handcuffs. Despite doing everything by the book, Edwin was unjustly detained by ICE inside the very system he trusted to hear his case.”
A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to a request for comment for this story — either about Sanchez’s case, or about conditions and processes in Moshannon generally.
While most of the people detained in Moshannon are from the Northeast, Paoletti said ICE also brings in some detainees from California and the South.
Detainees come from a range of countries, such as Afghanistan, Belarus, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Togo, and Venezuela, she said.
Once detained at Moshannon, individual cases fall under the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia ICE field office, according to Paoletti. The office’s case decisions may be reviewed or disputed in immigration court, which takes place in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for Moshannon cases, she said.
Moshannon is approaching capacity
The average number of detainees housed at Moshannon, measured by ICE bimonthly, has climbed steadily since the facility began housing detainees in 2021. The most recent average daily population numbers, released by TRAC late last month, stood at 1,309 — a record.
Across the country, the number of people detained has risen from just over 39,000 in January to more than 51,000 in June. That increase differs sharply from the gradually rising numbers of the Biden administration.
As Moshannon’s average daily population numbers climb toward its 1,876-bed capacity and national numbers of detainees soar, advocacy groups say they fear that a higher detention center population will result in overcrowding, which could exacerbate existing civil rights issues at Moshannon.
The problem, Paoletti said, is that the U.S. is detaining too many people, period.
“Detention should only be used for civil immigration violations as a matter of last resort. Here, we use it as a default,” she said.
Ongoing abuse allegations
The allegations of civil rights violations at Moshannon that Paoletti referenced are both longstanding and well-documented. For a brief period, they were even being federally investigated.
In August of last year, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a memorandum to ICE announcing it would conduct an on-site investigation into abuse allegations against Moshannon. The memorandum followed a series of individual complaints, including one related to the death of a detainee in solitary confinement.
Other allegations included detainees being denied appropriate medical care, due process violations, and immigrants not having adequate access to translation services, according to the memorandum.
DOGE gutted the CRCL in March, which led to heightened concern among civil rights groups about safeguards against alleged abuses at the facility. ICE did not return a request for comment on the status of the report.
Without the CRCL, any complaint against Moshannon must go through a regional ICE field office director instead, according to Paolleti. In her view, ICE’s priority is enforcement of immigration laws before due process, meaning “there is a real issue about any sort of oversight as to conditions at Moshannon and across the board.”
ICE gave Moshannon a “superior” rating and recommended the Philadelphia field office continue working with them in its March 2025 compliance inspection report, which Paoletti found “shocking but not surprising.”
Moshannon has also faced abuse allegations independent from federal investigations in the past year, including an September 2024 report from the Sheller Center for Social Justice l and a July 2024 federal complaint from the ACLU.
For Lee, who supervised the Sheller Center report, the most concerning finding from her research was the use of solitary confinement as a punishment against detainees.
The Sheller Center report alleges that Moshannon wrongfully sent people into solitary confinement and used it as a threat when it is meant to be “nonpunitive.” One person interviewed for the report said he was losing his mind, rationality, and hope while sitting in a cell for 23 to 24 hours per day. Another person described the experience as being “in a cage.”
The use of solitary confinement in immigration detention centers is not limited to Moshannon. A 2024 Harvard Law School report found that people in ICE custody were placed in solitary confinement as punishment at least 14,000 times in the past five years.
The ACLU’s federal complaint alleges that Moshannon denied language access, recounting the experience of one person who was denied telephonic interpretation and forced to communicate with correctional officers using very limited English, including when he tried to tell them that he was going on a hunger strike.
The ACLU complaint also alleges that Moshannon denied people adequate medical care, including women seeking gynecological services. The report described women being shackled and transported off-site to receive treatment, which deterred them from requesting medical services, according to Paoletti.
Multiple women interviewed in the report also accused Moshannon medical staff of not following through on promises to provide care, including staff who allegedly told a woman they would schedule surgery for her ovarian growths then ignored her further requests for the procedure. She continued to live at Moshannon in pain until she was deported months later, the report says.
Lee and Paoletti, who served as co-counsel on the ACLU federal complaint, both told Spotlight PA they did not think Moshannon has addressed or rectified the abuse allegations.
Little response from Pennsylvania lawmakers
There has been little action on the state level related to Moshannon, though lawmakers have begun to call for action on ICE detentions generally in response to the Trump administration’s crackdown.
One state senator, Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia), is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit municipalities from formally collaborating with ICE.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, meanwhile, has so far avoided issuing many public comments on the rise in federal detentions, though he did criticize the Trump administration this month for poor governing after it briefly published an error-filled list of sanctuary cities at risk of funding losses.
Late last year, as the Trump administration began describing its mass deportation plans, Shapiro said he was planning to take a “wait and see” approach.
A spokesperson for the governor did not return a request for comment about whether his position had changed.
However on Thursday, Shapiro did issue a statement on immigration demonstrations planned for this weekend, saying that, “So long as I am your Governor, I will continue working every day to protect our freedom and keep our communities safe. Here in the Commonwealth William Penn founded on the promise that it would be welcoming to people from all walks of life, we can and must do both.”
Lee believes that immigrant rights groups and state legislators are focusing on issues like sanctuary city status and limiting law enforcement involvement in immigrant communities, rather than detention center issues.
This strategy may be an effort to triage an increasingly dire situation: “People are being picked up and arrested. … I think that a lot of energy is getting poured into … a lot of other work that needs to happen before you can convince state legislators to talk about getting rid of immigration detention,” she said.
But other advocates were less generous.
“Leaders at the state level, including our governor, have been silent on immigration at the best, and at worst, they have enabled fear-mongering against immigrants,” Torres said. “They are not being the leaders that we need right now.”
Elena Eisenstadt is an intern with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association. Learn more about the program. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Clearfield County officials entered into the two contracts that allow Moshannon to operate — one with GEO Group, the private prison owner, and one with ICE.