Berks County Family Center full

The Reading Eagle reports that Berks County officials were unaware of ICE's policy change, and have no room for families transferred from Texas:

Federal officials announced Thursday that they were closing a detention center for immigrant families in Texas and sending the detained families to the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility in the former Berks Heim.

But nobody told Berks County. And the Berks facility is full.

County Commissioner Kevin S. Barnhardt, who is chairman of the county prison board, said he was unaware of the move by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Kenneth A. Borkey Jr., executive director of the Bern Township facility, which houses families awaiting immigration hearings, said the center is at capacity.

Immigration officials could not be reached for comment.

In the announcement, they said the closing of the 512-bed T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas, was the first step in shifting illegal-immigration cases from the criminal to the civil court system.

Officials said they would send detained families to the Berks facility until it was filled and then develop alternative programs, such as supervised release, to monitor families awaiting deportation hearings.

Borkey said he was drafting a memo with the bad news for the immigration agency.

"We have an 84-bed capacity and we are at capacity," Borkey said.

Borkey said he planned to notify county commissioners and consult with immigration officials about reconfiguring the building to make room for more detainee families.

The county, which signed a contract with ICE that became effective Thursday, is reimbursed $197 a day per individual.

Borkey said news of the Texas closing rattled his employees, who feared their jobs also might be in jeopardy.

"At this time the county has not been informed of any changes to our program," Borkey said.

No word yet on whether Hutto's families will, indeed, be transferred or whether ICE will allow the detained family population to shrink gradually.

Practically speaking, it seems preferable to release families on bond, parole, and recognizance and as their claims are processed through immigration courts.

Most families detained at Hutto and Berks are asylum-seeking, and are therefore eligible for various forms of release. In fact, detaining refugees and asylum-seekers in prison-like conditions is generally considered bad policy and against international law, as this can re-traumatize people fleeing persecution, abuse, violence, and torture.

What about Berks?

The numerous reports highlighting the transfer of families from Hutto to Berks have brought attention to this rather under-publicized family residential facility, and I thought I'd provide some information about Berks. (The Reading Eagle reports, however, that the Berks Family Shelter Care Center is full. See previous post.)

Berks was opened in March of 2001, as an extension of Berks County's contract with then-INS' juvenile detention program. It is located on a large tract of land in Bernville Township that holds a number of county services: recycling, water treatment, an elderly care facility, a prison, a youth corrections center, a juvenile detention center, a community college, and an agricultural center.

The family detention center is located in an old nursing home, built in the 1950s. Still called Berks Heim by locals, the facility was a state of the art residence for elderly folks that required specialized care. Built as a residence, rather than a prison, Berks has been held up as an alternative to T Don Hutto. Licensed by the state of Pennsylvania and run according to child welfar principles, Berks has not been subject to the same media or legal attention as Hutto.

But as the Women's Refugee Commission's Michell Brané pointed out in Locking up Family Values, Berks is far from perfect. In response to ICE's policy change, Brané maintains: "While conditions there were not as shocking as those at Hutto, they are not appropriate. For example, children over five, are separated from their parents at night. We believe that families should not be detained unless absolutely necessary and only for an extremely short period of time.” (See the Women's Commissions full press release here.)

Both the ACLU and the Women's Commission (as well as others) have argued the authority structure of detention is harmful to families, since it strips parents of their role as arbiters of the family unit. While much of the attention has been focused on the conditions of detention, people often forget the effects any institutional environment will have on the less tangible--but fundamental--relationships between parents and children.

Mentioned even less often is how institutionalization effects relationships between parents, since their contact is highly constrained. Married couples cannot, for example, sleep together nor show affection towards each other. These kinds of relationships require some degree of privacy, which is difficult to balance with security and authority structures inherent to institutional custody.

There is no research on this, but as human beings, we can expect that compiling the stress of filing and pursuing claims with an inability to care for each other in familiar ways will have long terms effects on family relationships. This points to the larger question, which Brané has repeated asked, about the suitability detaining any families at all.