CLEARFIELD — U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-5th District) said she was denied entry to the largest immigration detention center in the northeast on Wednesday.

The privately operated Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County was the subject of a high-profile complaint by civil rights advocates last year. Scanlon told the Capital-Star she has heard concerns about constituents from her suburban Philadelphia being held in the center under poor conditions including inadequate medical and mental health care.

“We’ve had reports about folks being unable to get adequate food. Either they were going hungry or they were … forced to purchase their own food from the commissary,” Scanlon said.

Despite a provision in a 2024 federal appropriations bill giving members of congress the authority to make unannounced oversight visits, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials refused her request to enter the facility.

“They said they would not be letting me in specifically to do the oversight visit, because they were under orders not to do so by the secretary of DHS Kristi Noem,” Scanlon said. “And they repeatedly said they were aware of the fact that there is a federal law.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Scanlon being denied entry to the facility.

Scanlon is the second member of Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to be turned away by officials at Moshannon Valley this week. On Monday, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-12th District) was denied entry to the center to conduct oversight after the death earlier this month of a Chinese national being held there.

Lee said in a statement Monday her denied entry into Moshannon Valley is an example of the Trump administration’s executive overreach.

“With numerous allegations of human rights abuses, our communities deserve to know how people are being treated inside these taxpayer-funded facilities,” Lee said. “Transparency and accountability are non-negotiables in a democracy, and ICE cannot be allowed to operate in the shadows.”

Similar scenes have played out at detention centers elsewhere in the nation in recent months. Notably, Democratic New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver and other lawmakers were involved in a confrontation with federal officials outside a recently reopened facility in Newark in May.

McIver was later indicted on three counts of “assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering” with federal officers, which she has said are politically motivated.

Moshannon Valley, which Scanlon said has recently housed between 1,200 and 1,700 people, is a former federal prison operated on behalf of ICE by private prison operator GEO Group. The company operates 97 facilities, including the one in Newark where McIver was denied entry.

GEO Group’s contract is with Clearfield County, which provides the space to ICE in an arrangement that circumvents a Biden-era ban on for-profit prisons.

Scanlon said the complaint the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Legal Services of New Jersey and the University of Pennsylvania law school filed with the Department of Homeland Security has not been resolved. That’s in part, she claimed, because the Trump administration gutted the DHS Office of Civil Rights that was handling it.

The Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple University Beasley School of Law and the immigrant rights group Juntos also released a report last year based on interviews with 70 people held at Moshannon Valley.

It called for the center to be closed, alleging immigrants and asylum seekers are subject to physical and psychological abuse, lack adequate access to health care, and face retaliation for standing up against mistreatment.

“There are problems that we’re hearing about from a variety of sources, and that’s why we need to be able to get in there and see what the situation is,” Scanlon said.

Scanlon said federal immigration officials have historically been willing to work with members of Congress and advocates to address concerns about conditions in immigration facilities. With the Trump administration’s “rampant ramp up” of deportation and the Republican budget reconciliation bill adding $45 billion to ICE’s budget, Congressional oversight is more important than ever, she said.

“What we’re seeing now is, first of all, a total lack of transparency,” Scanlon said, noting that families, their lawyers and advocates are having difficulty locating people within the immigration system. “There’s a whole host of issues which, if you have transparency, you can then begin to address all of this,” she said.

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