CLEARFIELD — The Clearfield County Board of Commissioners voted 2-1 on Tuesday to approve a six-month contract extension for the operation of Moshannon Valley Processing Center.
Commissioners Tim Winters and John Sobel voted in favor of the extension, and Commissioner Dave Glass voted against.
“We shouldn’t be in the middle of it,” Glass said in opposition to the contract. “I don’t want to even tangentially support this. I think there’s a better way.”
Sobel and Winters said that rejecting the contract would’ve negatively impacted the Philipsburg-Osceola Area School District because it receives property tax revenue from the facility. Plus, they said, it would eliminate any oversight the county has of Moshannon, the largest immigration detention facility in the Northeast.
“I will be the first to say, our oversight ability is very small, but we still have it,” Winters said. “If we vote no, we have no communication, we have no place in this. We can only vote on the proposal before us.”
In September 2021, the county entered into five-year agreements with ICE and GEO Group. It has served as a middleman between the government agency and the private contractor that owns and operates Moshannon. The setup offered a workaround to former President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order banning private federal prisons, which President Donald Trump reversed in 2025.
The contract extension modifies the staffing plan and changes the contracting officer, but “all other terms and conditions remain unchanged,” according to a copy of the document obtained through a public records request.
Since the facility reopened as an immigration detention facility, it has drawn criticism for poor-quality food, inadequate healthcare, and inhumane conditions. The facility’s population has only risen as the Trump administration has escalated federal immigration policy and quickened deportations at a historic rate.
The intergovernmental agreement allows commissioners to enter the facility with 24-hour notice, but the officials have been denied access in the past.
Jeff Migliozzi, communications director at advocacy group Freedom for Immigrants, told Spotlight PA last week that he acknowledged that the Clearfield County commissioners provide minor oversight, but he was skeptical they could prevent problems endemic to the U.S. detention system.
Opponents of Moshannon have long called on the county to end its relationship with GEO Group and ICE, for which it receives $200,000 per year.
“It makes me so angry that every day I go to work, a portion of my money goes to harm these people who are desperate for our help,” William Fescemyer, a member of progressive advocacy group Indivisible: Outcry, said at the meeting prior to the vote. “I don’t know how to convince you that this is so unbelievably evil. It betrays that flag. It betrays our country.”
Sobel and Winters told the roughly 60 protesters present at Tuesday’s meeting to direct their energy toward their elected U.S. representatives and senators, and toward the officials who enact federal immigration policy.
After the meeting, protesters gathered outside in a show of support for the people who are detained at Moshannon, yelling “Shut it down.”
Among them was Staysi Rosario, director of communications at Frontline Dignity, an organization that supports people impacted by federal immigration enforcement.
“It’s a shame that the conversation is around economic development,” Rosario told Spotlight PA. “Human dignity is not about economic development. We shouldn’t be figuring out how this is gonna benefit us economically when there are babies needing baby formula.”
During the meeting, Rosario said she received a call from the wife of someone detained at Moshannon. Her organization has regularly heard from families scrambling to buy diapers and winter clothes following a primary breadwinner being detained.
Charlotte Moyal is one of many mothers facing that scenario. Her husband has been in Moshannon for 19 months. She drove from Maryland with their 6-year-old son to attend the meeting. He wore a shirt that said, “Release them all! Release my daddy!”
Between almost $10,000 in attorney fees, buying a new home, and sending her husband commissary money, Moyal is spread thin. She has created a GoFundMe and taken odd jobs, like mowing lawns, all while taking care of her son, who has a disability.
A judge issued her husband a final removal order to Afghanistan in March, but Moyal said he couldn’t be sent there because the country isn’t accepting deportees.
She’s reached out to elected officials in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but feels like no one cares, she said.
Moyal worries about her husband, who she said has been struggling with thoughts of self-harm. He’s been losing weight, is often sick, and is covered in mosquito bites.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Moyal said about her fight to release her husband. “I’ve sunk everything into it.”
Even with Tuesday’s vote, questions remain about the future of the detention center.
It’s possible Clearfield County commissioners won’t have a role to play after the contract extension expires in March, as ICE reviews its detention operations in Pennsylvania.
In mid-July, ICE published a request for information on “turn-key detention services” for four regions across the country, including central Pennsylvania.
When asked about what the RFI means for Moshannon, an ICE spokesperson previously told Spotlight PA that the agency is “evaluating options, including the potential purchase of turnkey detention facilities where appropriate, or other contracting solutions to support continuity of operations.”
That could mean contracting directly with GEO Group, and cutting the county out as the middleman.
“ICE does not discuss potential facility acquisition or other plans prior to official action. The contract with Moshannon Valley Processing Center was extended for an additional 6 months, and the long-term solicitation process remains ongoing,” an ICE spokesperson told Spotlight PA in an email Tuesday.
GEO Group didn’t return a request for comment for this story.
The company’s founder and CEO George Zoley told shareholders in a second-quarter earnings call in early August that the company is “engaged in an active process for the sale of several of our turnkey facilities, subject to mutual agreement on price and our continued management of those facilities under long-term support services contracts.”
He also said that “several other GEO facilities have support services contracts that expire later this year. ICE has initiated a procurement process involving four facilities that we hope will result in new long-term support services contracts being awarded.”
Zoley did not specify during the call which facilities he was referring to for potential sales or renewed contracts.
In late August, ICE published a request for proposal for several turnkey detention facilities, naming Moshannon explicitly as a “Historical Location” in the facility-specific requirements portion of the request.
“The Contractor shall furnish the proposed detention facility and provide all management, supervision, personnel, labor, equipment, vehicles, supplies, materials, and services necessary to provide safe, secure, humane, and compliant detention services for ICE detainees,” the request says.
Though ICE and GEO Group haven’t confirmed whether Moshannon is up for sale, they haven’t denied that possibility.
Migliozzi told Spotlight PA he thinks the federal government’s approach to buying detention facilities circumvents accountability and further obscures their operations, as there is no precedent for states to regulate the federal government.
“If, in fact, the federal government purchases Moshannon,” he said, “it will only become more difficult to monitor and expose what is happening inside, and that is very intentional on the part of the federal government.”