York County Prison has no more ICE detainees

In York, some immigrants recently stopped eating to protest their possible transfer.

“We certainly had clients with a criminal background, and I could understand why ICE was arguing to transfer them. But we’ve also had clients who should never have been jailed, ”said immigration lawyer Jackie Kline of the Aldea People’s Justice Center in Berks County.

Often times, when people are moved to more remote locations or other states, they are evicted from their communities and find it harder to obtain legal assistance. It can take a lawyer a full day to meet someone in Pike County, and in some far-flung facilities it’s “hard to reach them just by phone,” Kline said.

Members of immigrant organizations gathered outside the ICE Detention Center in Philadelphia demanding the prisoners’ release on August 12, 2021. (Kimberly Paynter / WHYY)

The American Civil Liberties Union sued attempts to stop transfers from Essex County, New Jersey, but a federal judge sided with the agency.

At the rally outside the ICE field office in Philadelphia, lawyers played a testimony from Renee Miller, whose husband Rohan Jordan was detained in York and then transferred to Florida after he was arrested in April for what Miller called a “non-violent crime” .

Miller and her two children live in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and initially said she hoped her husband, who came to the United States from Jamaica in 1998, could fight his immigration case in Baltimore. Instead, he was taken to York, Pennsylvania, which was far away but “wasn’t too far to drive,” she said.

Then, as abruptly as he was arrested, Miller said Jordan had been transferred to the Glades County Detention Center in South Florida.

“It’s not right,” she said. “My 15 year old son, my 15 year old black son, needs his father!”