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Asylum Seekers’ Hunger Strike Ends After ICE Threats

Guards at Pennsylvania’s Berks County Residential Center told asylum seekers that if they got “too weak” during the hunger strike, their children would have to be taken away from them.

The hunger strike was launched August 8 in response to recent comments made by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson, who said the average length of stay in family detention is 20 days. Women who participated in the hunger strike said their average length of stay has been between 270 and 365 days. Keith Homan / Shutterstock.com

Twenty-two asylum seeking women detained inside of Pennsylvania’s Berks County Residential Center ended their 15-day hunger strike August 23 because of intimidation from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.

There are plans to restart the hunger strike next week.

Erika Almiron, director of the immigrant rights organization Juntos and a member of the Shut Down Berks Coalition, told Rewire in an email Friday that the women are participating in “an ayuno,” eating one meal a day, but will stop eating again next week.

The hunger strike was launched August 8 in response to recent comments made by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson, who said the average length of stay in family detention is 20 days, as Rewire reported. Women who participated in the hunger strike said their average length of stay has been between 270 and 365 days.

When the hunger strike first launched, Almiron told Rewire that the women were already being threatened by Berks guards, who told them that if they got “too weak” during the hunger strike, their children would have to be taken away from them. These fears came to fruition when the head of ICE for Berks, Thomas Decker, came to speak to the hunger strikers, according to Democracy Now!.

“He came only to threaten us, to tell us that if we were a danger for this facility, for the other women who are not on strike, then he was going to be obligated to take action, such that they would send us to Texas, simply that they would send us to an adult prison,” a hunger striker told Democracy Now!.

Threatening to transfer hunger strikers to another facility, away from their legal counsel and support systems, is a common tactic used by ICE. This threat was carried out last year against women who participated in a hunger strike at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas.

The hunger striker told Democracy Now! that Decker told the women that if they continue refusing to eat, “he was going to be obligated to call the government so they would take away our children.”

Berks is one of two remaining family detention centers in the country, meaning women are detained alongside their children in a prison-like setting, a practice that is considered inhumane and has been proven to be detrimental to the health and well-being of children.

Advocates question whether or not Berks is legally allowed to operate. In July, a federal appeals court ordered DHS to end family detention because it violates Flores v. Johnson, a lawsuit that determined that children arriving to the United States with their mothers should not be held in unlicensed detention centers.

Shortly after, family detention centers were forced to seek licensing as child-care facilities (a battle they’re losing in Texas), but the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (PA DHS) licensed Berks to operate as a children’s delinquency center.

In October 2015, PA DHS decided not to renew the license, which would have expired February 21, 2016, because the facility holds asylum-seeking families as opposed to only children, as the license permitted. Berks appealed the decision to not renew its license, and continues to operate until it receives a ruling on that appeal.

Berks has a history of human rights abuses, including the repeated sexual assault of a 19-year-old asylum seeking mother by a former Berks counselor. At least one child detained inside of Berks witnessed the assault. The family detention center has also been accused of failing to provide adequate health-care services.

Berks County commissioners continue to defend the detention center, asserting that state officials “revoked the center’s license for political reasons” and that advocates are “spreading false information about conditions at the facility,” reported the Reading Eagle.

“What is being spread about what is taking place in the facility is flat out wrong,” Berks Commissioner Christian Y. Leinbach said, the Reading Eagle reported. “If half of it was true, it would have been shut down already.”