Since 2019, the Green Party of Pennsylvania (GPPA, www.gpofpa.org) has been on record calling for the closing of the Berks County Detention Center. Many people were shocked to learn that Berks had been housing immigrant families (including children) since 2014. They were unaware that family detention and mass deportation as tools of immigration enforcement did not originate with the Trump administration.
As of February 27, there are no more families and children being detained at Berks. HURRAY!!! Unfortunately, Berks County Commissioners are not being very transparent about whether or not their contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will continue. On March 26, Make the Road PA and the Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University Law School filed suit against the commissioners demanding that they publicly explain and discuss their negotiations with ICE and share relevant materials with the public. This would not stop Berks County from contracting again
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Berks County Residential Center, July 19, 2019. (Katie Meyer/WITF)
Six employees at the Berks Family Residential center have tested positive for coronavirus in the last two months, and earlier this month, the center reported its first case among detainees.
The detainee’s case is one of more than 100 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among asylum-seeking families detained by the federal government.
The center’s cases were revealed in filings by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier this month in a Washington, D.C. district court. The filings are part of an ongoing court case in which multiple immigrant advocacy legal groups call for families to be released from detention due to the pandemic. The documents detail how COVID-19 has entered the nation’s three family detention centers in recent months.