Sister Janice Vanderneck of St. Joseph of Baden and a founder of Casa San Jose, a Latino immigrant rights advocacy group, visited the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an immigrant detention center, on Monday.
During her visit as a volunteer with the chaplain’s office, Vanderneck asked a group of about 20 women, whom she was praying with, how many of them were mothers.
Almost all raised their hands.
“They are very longing to have contact with their family,” Vanderneck said.
On Saturday, in a Mother’s Day weekend show of solidarity, a caravan of immigrant rights advocates and local leaders will gather outside Pittsburgh’s ICE headquarters before heading to the Clearfield County detention center to support the women detained at Moshannon and families separated by immigration detention.
Organizers of the rally include leadership from Casa San Jose, Indivisible Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Women for Democracy. Speakers include Vanderneck, Pittsburgh Councilwoman Barb Warwick, D-Greenfield, and U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, among others.
In March, Warwick co-sponsored a bill to bar the city from cooperating with ICE. On Wednesday, Pittsburgh City Council voted unanimously in favor of legislation that would prohibit ICE from using city facilities during a preliminary vote.
“As I watch my constituents struggle with everything from rent, gas and groceries to childcare and elder care, it’s sickening to see our tax dollars spent on locking up hardworking mothers, traumatizing their kids and tearing their families apart. Trump and his ICE thugs are criminals. I’m proud of every Pittsburgh mom using her voice to call for this horror to stop,” Warwick said in a statement to TribLive.
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security ICE office in Philadelphia did not respond to requests for comment.
Vanderneck said financial limitations plague many of the mothers in Moshannon. The women said they cannot afford a lawyer or even video calls with their loved ones
Vanderneck did not know how much a video call from inside Moshannon cost.
In August, Lee was denied access to Moshannon Valley Processing Center, which is the largest immigration detention center in the northeast. Officials at the center gave her a letter saying security required a seven days’ notice for a visit.
Last year, Congress passed a law that explicitly prohibits DHS from preventing members of Congress from entering any facilities operated by or for DHS. Then in April, Lee called for the center’s closure after reports of a hunger strike.
“For so many of us, Mother’s Day means visiting our moms, hugging our grandmothers and being surrounded by the people who raised us. But for the women detained at Moshannon, it is a painful reminder of everything ICE has taken from them: their children, their families and their freedom,” Lee said in a news release Friday.
As part of the rally, the organizations are collecting donations for the women, including face wash, socks, body wash, lip balm, pens, journals, coloring pencils and activity books.
Tracy Baton, director of Indivisible Pittsburgh, said rally organizers specifically asked about period products but were told they could not bring them for the women. Baton said Moshannon did not provide a reason why.
So far, the rally has hundreds of people signed up to meet at the ICE office on Sidney Street at 10 a.m. The group will listen to speeches, pray and sing before some of the group loads onto a bus headed for the detention center.
Baton said that the family members of the detained women will not make the trip to the center.
“We have not found family members who feel safe to travel in this action,” Baton said.