Immigration advocates are demanding the closure of Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Central Pennsylvania following the death of a detainee at the facility.
Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old man from China, died early Tuesday morning, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Though the cause of death is still being investigated, MVPC staff found Ge hanging by his neck in the shower room of his detention pod. He had been in custody for five days at the center, the largest in the Northeast, and was awaiting a hearing. Ge arrived at the center through an ICE detainer request after being arrested for alleged criminal use of a communication facility, unlawful use of a computer and access device fraud.
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Activists from across the state have long criticized the conditions at the center, where Cameroonian national Frankline Okpu also died in 2023. At a press conference Thursday, they urged Clearfield County, where MVPC is located, to end its contract with ICE and Geo Group, the private prison company that operates the facility.
“That is the only way that these deaths will stop,” Adrianna Torres-García, deputy director of the Philadelphia-based Free Migration Project, said at the conference.
Torres-García said human rights abuses are “rampant” at MVPC, a former federal prison that now houses up to 1,876 ICE detainees. In past interviews with advocates, immigrants housed there said the staff withheld food and water, and delayed or denied access to medical treatment. They also reported wrongful placements in solitary confinement, where detainees are denied calls with their attorneys and access to the law library.
Erika Guadalupe, executive director of the Philly advocacy group Juntos, recalled visiting the facility in 2023 for these interviews and seeing “cramped” conditions in the dormitory-like pods that house 60 to 70 people. A male detainee who had been in custody for eight months told her he had not received a pillow until her visit, she added.
A 2024 report from a Temple University Beasley School of Law student clinic, which drew on the interviews, concluded that detainees “are being held under punitive, inhumane and dangerous conditions.”
The facility was also the subject of a federal complaint from the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, filed on behalf of Okpu’s widow. The ACLU said ICE had failed to honor a Freedom of Information Act request for Okpu’s medical records, detention file and autopsy report, which listed his cause of death as MDMA toxicity.
ICE has not yet released a full report on Ge’s death, the first since Okpu’s passing. But activists say even one death is too many, and that shuttering the facility — and releasing, not transferring, its detainees — is the only acceptable course of action.
“This most recent death serves as a reminder of what we know: Moshannon should not exist, and we want it closed now,” Guadalupe said.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
