As Detained Immigrants Strike Against ‘Chaos and Cruelty,’ Advocates Demand ‘Not Another Dime for ICE’
“Americans want real accountability and reform, and there is no version in Congress that reins in ICE and addresses the abuses we are witnessing,” said the head of America’s Voice.
Protestors stand behind barricades near the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center on June 1, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
(Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images)
Jessica Corbett
Jun 01, 2026
COMMON DREAMS
With US senators returning to Capitol Hill on Monday after a Memorial Day recess, Republicans are working to get a second budget reconciliation package to President Donald Trump’s desk—and critics of his mass deportation campaign continue to push back against giving immigration enforcement agencies $72 billion.
Much of that money would go to the US Department of Homeland Security and two of its agencies, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump’s deportation agenda notably got over $170 billion in last year’s budget reconciliation package, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Since Trump signed that legislation last summer, he has deployed federal agents to various communities across the country, including Chicago and the Twin Cities, where they were documented violating the rights of US citizens and immigrants alike—even killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
Immigrants who have been caught up in such operations have often been held in “inhumane conditions” at detention centers. For example, according to a lawsuit filed last week, a tent encampment at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas “has become notorious for flagrant human rights abuses that people endure during their detention—they are confined to windowless enclosures in tents and suffer egregious physical abuse by guards; abhorrent medical and mental health care, including for people with chronic conditions like cancer and HIV; indiscriminate use of solitary confinement to punish and silence victims of guard abuse; and other flagrant constitutional violations, including exposure to measles, tuberculosis, and other diseases.”
“Not even a year in, there already have been three reported deaths at Camp East Montana,” the complaint notes. “In one case, a man was beaten to death after asking for his asthma medication—a death the medical examiner later ruled a homicide. A fourth man died shortly after being released from Camp East Montana, where he had been denied the chemotherapy that he needed to treat his cancer.”
Overall, from Trump’s return to office early last year to late April, ICE has reported more than 50 detainee deaths. An Associated Press investigation published last week found that at least 10 of them, all men, died by suicide.
“Not another dime for ICE—not while children are locked in trailer prisons, detainees are on hunger strike, and protesters are being pepper-sprayed for demanding basic decency,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the group America’s Voice, said in a Monday statement.
As her group detailed:
Detainees at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey are on a hunger and labor strike, now in its fifth day, citing reported infestations, inadequate medical care, and no air conditioning, with protests outside met by masked ICE agents deploying pepper spray and tasers. At the Desert View Annex in Adelanto, California, at least 20 detainees launched a hunger strike citing a lack of medical care, unsafe drinking water, and mold. At Dilley, Texas, more than 6,300 children have been detained since the start of Trump’s second term in facilities described by those inside as a trailer prison, with lights on 24 hours a day and children as young as two months old among those held. Meanwhile, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has threatened to halt processing of international travelers at Newark Airport amid the ongoing dispute with New Jersey officials over conditions at Delaney Hall.
Following protests on Friday and Saturday nights at Delaney Hall, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka imposed a curfew from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am ET. Multiple people who did not comply with it on Sunday night were arrested.
CBS News reported that as the curfew took effect, “a warning was issued to the protesters who had gathered outside the zone. Thirteen minutes later, state police in riot gear rushed toward the crowd. Officers on horses came in from the other side, surrounding the crowd and herding them away into a standoff.”
Discussing the New Jersey demonstrations during an interview on Fox News, Mullin claimed that “they’re not just exercising their First Amendment” rights; “these are violent protesters that are there to injure everybody—that’s even bystanders.”A DHS spokesperson said in a Monday statement to Fox News Digital that “RIOTERS WILL NOT SLOW US DOWN.”“The perimeter around Delaney Hall is FULLY closed... No rioters breached the perimeter last night. Our ICE operations continue undeterred,” the spokesperson added. “ANYONE who attempts to obstruct law enforcement or disrupt our operations will be prosecuted and face justice.”
Meanwhile, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), District 1, directed attention to those inside the facility, saying in a Monday statement that it “stands in full solidarity with the people detained at Delaney Hall in Newark who have laid down their labor and refused their meals to demand dignity, safety, and freedom.”As CWA District 1 detailed:Make no mistake: This is a labor struggle. The people held inside Delaney Hall are forced to cook meals, clean the floors, and keep the facility running—for as little as one dollar a day. These workers are on strike to protest the unconscionable conditions they are forced to endure and the basic due process they are entitled to, but have been denied.While the private contractors who operate these detention centers bank millions, the workers who sustain them are denied the most basic protection and respect. When workers in those conditions organize, withhold their labor, and act together to demand better, they are doing what working people have always done to win justice. We recognize a strike when we see one.The labor movement was built on the principle that no person should be exploited, silenced, or treated as less than human because of who they are or where they come from. The demands coming from inside Delaney Hall—an end to medical neglect, an end to exploitative labor, the release of the elderly, the young, and the sick, and the restoration of basic due process—are the same demands for dignity, equity, and justice that animate our own fight every day. An injury to one is an injury to all.We honor the courage of the strikers and of the families and community members standing watch outside the facility, and we defend their right to peaceful protest. And we condemn in the strongest terms the escalation and violence by ICE and state police against people peacefully exercising their constitutional rights.Cárdenas of America’s Voice called out Trump, Mullin, and Stephen Miller, the president’s White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, who is infamous for pushing the family separation policy during his first term.“The Trump-Miller mass purge machine is running unchecked, and Mullin isn’t bringing accountability,” Cárdenas said Monday. “Instead, this administration continues draining resources from real public safety, separating American-born children from their parents, and spending millions on masked agents while American families are unable to make ends meet.”“The Senate has a clear choice to make: Side with the chaos and cruelty or listen to the American people,” she continued. “Poll after poll reveals that the public resoundingly rejects masked and armed agents inflicting random violence against immigrants and Americans alike.”“Americans want real accountability and reform, and there is no version in Congress that reins in ICE and addresses the abuses we are witnessing,” she stressed. “This administration has made clear that reform is not on the table. Congress should not give them another dime to prove it.”Both chambers of Congress are narrowly controlled by Republicans, but efforts by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to advance immigration enforcement legislation have been hampered by Trump’s controversial $1.776 billion slush fund for insurrectionists. However, as of Monday, after losses in court, the Trump administration is backing off its push for the fund for now, meaning the bill may soon move forward on Capitol Hill.“I can’t think of a less appropriate time to pour another $72 billion into ICE and CBP—especially without requiring meaningful reforms or accountability measures,” Bridget Moix, a leader at Quaker organizations including Friends Committee on National Legislation, FCNL Education Fund, and Friends Place on Capitol Hill, wrote Friday for Religion News Service.“As Quakers, we reject the false choice between security and human dignity,” Moix added. “True safety cannot be built through fear, cruelty, or unchecked power. Lasting security comes from thriving communities, functioning institutions, economic opportunity, and respect for human rights.”
A Movement Is Growing to Close the Largest ICE Jail on the East Coast
An ICE jail in rural Pennsylvania has been accused of medical neglect, providing unsafe water, and serving spoiled food.June 2, 2026
Democratic Pennsylvania Congressmembers Chris Deluzio and Summer Lee speak with journalists after their unannounced congressional visit to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County.Courtesy of U.S. Rep. Summer Lee
As people defy a police crackdown and flock to support hunger strikers at Delaney Hall in New Jersey, a campaign is growing in rural Pennsylvania to shut down ICE’s largest immigration jail on the East Coast, where a man with advanced kidney failure worries he may become the fourth person held there to die in the past three years.
“No treatment was given to me whatsoever when clear blood was spotted when using the restroom,” Izzy Aly said in a statement read by county resident Sherilyn Sheets at the bimonthly Clearfield County commissioners meeting last Tuesday. Sheets then played an audio recording of Aly, pleading with the commissioners in his own voice: “There is no question that my situation is precarious to say the least. Please do something.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Aly in December at the Philadelphia International Airport as he flew home to Florida from a U.S. Customs and Immigration Services-approved visit to Egypt to handle his recently deceased father’s estate. He had attended school in the Orlando area for about a decade and had a pending green card application, but was taken to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center. The 1,876-bed ICE jail opened three years ago in a former prison that now holds mostly asylum seekers and longtime U.S. residents. Commissioners in this Republican-leaning county, which backed Trump by 75 percent in 2024, will vote by September on whether to renew its $268 million, five-year contract for the detention hub with ICE and private-prison corporation GEO Group, and their meetings have been packed with people calling on them to cancel it.
“Clearfield County should not and cannot be complicit in suffering,” said the second person to comment at a May 26 meeting, Tony D’Orazio, chair of the Clearfield County Libertarian Party and board member of the Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania.
D’Orazio told Truthout he learned about Moshannon last year and attended his first meeting Tuesday when he read a social post by Aly’s friend in Florida and realized Aly was detained “right here in my county, which got me looking into it a whole lot more.”
Opponents of the Moshannon facility have traveled from around the state in recent months to attend the meetings, but for the first time last week, the county solicitor refused to let them speak, citing time constraints.
“This has become a convenient soap box to address federal immigration issues,” complained Commissioner Tim Winters, who is chair of the board, at the May 26 meeting before motioning to adjourn
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Izzy Aly in 2023, before he was detained by ICE in December 2025 and sent to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, where he was told he has Stage 3b chronic kidney failure and says he hasn’t received adequate medical care
.Courtesy of J. Mark Barfield
While Winters has called Moshannon “a major economic driver,” D’Orazio argues it has had a “negative impact on tourism” since “people are coming to the region to protest this facility, not necessarily to see the beauty of Clearfield County. It’s also expensive.”
Clearfield’s three commissioners told PennLive they toured Moshannon “two or three times over the last five years,” but “have not spoken with any incarcerated people during those preplanned visits.”
Democratic Congressmembers Summer Lee and Chris Deluzio made an unannounced visit Tuesday to Moshannon, where Rep. Lee said they were granted a “pretty sanitized tour” of the women’s unit and saw at least two people held there who are pregnant.
Officials denied Rep. Deluzio’s request to meet with Randy Cordova Flores, a Peruvian father and asylum seeker arrested in February at a traffic stop in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Last August, Rep. Lee was turned away from a visit after she sent an inquiry about medical care for another asylum seeker, Maklim Gomez Escalante, who was detained there after being hospitalized for heart problems.
As the lawmakers briefed journalists on their visit, they stood in front of a billboard showing the “cost to detain one immigrant in Philipsburg for a year” is about $48,000, compared to about $22,000 to “educate one child.”
A note at the bottom of the graphic explained it was, “Created and paid for by local residents, clergy and advocates,” and listed a website — moshannonvalleyprocessingcenter.com — that offers “Ten Ways to Take Action,” including: “Attend a Commissioner Meeting.”
The barbed wire-surrounded prison at 555 Geo Drive in Philipsburg briefly shut down in 2021 when the Biden administration instructed federal prisons to end their use of private prisons. It reopened later that year, when it contracted with ICE with help from the Moshannon Valley Economic Development Partnership. Leonard Oddo, the current warden of Moshannon, is a member of the Partnership.
Bobbi Erickson, with the Shut Down Detention Coalition, turns her back on Clearfield County Commissioners who refuse to let her and others from outside counties speak during the public comment portion of a May 26 meeting about why they should vote to cancel their contract with ICE and GEO Group for the Moshannon Valley Processing Center.Youtube/ @clearfieldcountygovernment7019
Since then, complaints about conditions have been steady. Most recently, about 100 people incarcerated at Moshannon started a hunger strike in April to protest spoiled food and alleged medical neglect. About a week before Izzy Aly arrived in December, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir became the third person to die at the jail after ICE said he suffered “medical distress.” Abdulkadir was an Eritrean national and imam from Ohio whose federal habeas corpus petition and emergency motion pleading for his release to obtain adequate medical care were denied by a U.S. District judge.
Abdulkadir’s death while held at Moshannon along with those of Frankline Okpu and Chaofeng Ge, is evidence of “a systemic crisis,” said Zeynep Emanet, the civic engagement manager at CAIR Philadelphia, during a press conference last week by the Shut Down Detention Campaign to demand Aly’s immediate release “before another preventable tragedy occurs.”
Several members of the campaign are visiting people at Moshannon as part of a long-standing support network bottom-lined by Juntos, a Philadelphia-based immigrant-rights group.
About 100 people incarcerated at Moshannon started a hunger strike in April to protest spoiled food and alleged medical neglect.
“You actually get to look into their eyes while they’re telling you about one of the most traumatic moments in their lives, when ICE took them, and how they’ve been coping with that this whole time,” Adrianna Torres-Garcia, co-director of the Free Migration Project, told Truthout last week, after they made the four-hour drive from Philadelphia to the rural jail.
Torres-Garcia said people they met during their most recent visit told them the drinking water at the jail is brown and “doesn’t taste good,” echoing similar complaints by others, including Aly, who said a nurse told him to drink more water when he complained of abdominal pain.
Joining the group for her second visit was Bobbi Erickson, who lives in neighboring Jefferson County and co-founded Indivisible Mayday. She told Truthout people at the jail lack privacy, as they practically have to yell during visits to be heard over the top of a plexiglass barrier that separates them from visitors.
“I asked the man I was visiting with, ‘How is the food?’,” Erickson recalled. “He responded, ‘bad,’ and the guard right over his shoulder said, ‘Tell her it’s good.’”
“His main question to me was, ‘Why am I here?” Erickson said. “The only thing I could tell him is money, because there’s some rich CEO getting richer.”
Back in Florida, friends of Aly report he has lost his apartment, car, and even his pet cat while in detention. J Mark Barfield is coordinating a movement to “Help Izzy Get His Life Back,” after volunteering with him for about seven years in Florida’s Libertarian Party.
“If there is an ICE detention facility near you, find out who’s running it, find out how you shut it down, and start organizing immediately.”
“He last messaged me on December 22, saying he was about to board the airplane, and I messaged him several times saying, ’Where are you? Are you home yet?’ And I didn’t hear from him,” Barfield told Truthout. By February, Aly was able to obtain Barfield’s number and called him seeking help.
“He is frequently outspoken against unfair practices and what he sees as injustice,” Barfield noted, “so if anything, it may be a bit ironic that he’s suffering through the very thing that he fights so hard against.”
Barfield said Aly told him the water at Moshannon “frequently has a yellow hue to it,” with white flecks, a “coppery taste” and a “metallic odor” at times.
Erickson told Truthout she saw a large water storage tank at Moshannon “that is clearly in disrepair.”
When asked about the water quality and condition of the water tank at its facility, a GEO Group representative said in a statement to Truthout that “our support services are monitored by ICE and if “issues are identified, we quickly resolve all of ICE’s concerns as required by ICE’s Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan.” The representative claimed that access to “off-site medical specialists, imaging facilities, Emergency Medical Services, and local community hospitals is also provided when needed.”
As Aly marked the start of his fifth month in detention, he told Barfield his “pain is growing more acute.”
Across the country in California, complaints about poor food and lack of medical care prompted at least 20 people to launch a hunger strike in May at the GEO Group-run Adelanto ICE Processing Center, and protests in support of hunger strike launched Memorial Day at Delany Hall continue as well. Five of the men who launched the April hunger strike at Moshannon were put in solitary confinement.
D’Orazio and Erickson say they will attend the next Clearfield County Commissioners meeting next week once again to urge them to cancel the Moshannon contract instead of renewing it.
“Seeing that we have these facilities that make it easy to separate people from their families and from the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in our Constitution, not just to citizens, but to everybody on our shores, is really disheartening,” D’Orazio said, “but what really brings me hope is that there are so many people willing to speak up and say it’s wrong.”
When Erickson and others were refused a chance to participate in public comments during the last meeting, they stood and turned their backs as commissioners continued with old business. Erickson thinks people coming to speak from around the state have not been disruptive and urged commissioners to “read the Constitution.”
“I’m hyperfocused on Moshannon,” Erickson told Truthout, “which I think is what everyone should do. If there is an ICE detention facility near you, find out who’s running it, find out how you shut it down, and start organizing immediately.”
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Renée Feltz is an award-winning investigative journalist whose coverage of immigration, mass incarceration, environmental justice, and more spans 25 years. She is a former news co-director at Democracy Now!.
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