Artists, activists, lawmakers focus on Berks County facility for undocumented families

• Emily Previti/PA Post
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Katie Meyer

Madeleine Dean and Mary Gay Scanlon walk out of the Berks detention center after their impromptu tour.

‘A golden cage is still a cage.’

Katie Meyer

Madeleine Dean and Mary Gay Scanlon walk out of the Berks detention center after their impromptu tour.

• U.S. Reps. Madeline Dean, D-4, and Mary Gay Scanlon, D-5, recently showed up unannounced at the Berks Family Residential Center in Bern Township for undocumented asylum seekers. WITF’s Katie Meyer was there, too, and reported on what they found on their impromptu tour. Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Casey called for changes to asylum procedures after his visit to migrant processing and detention centers in McAllen, Texas.

• Federal lawmakers took their trips to immigration detention sites in Pennsylvania and on the U.S.-Mexico border just as a group of psychologists warned that holding children in facilities like these puts them at great risk for psychological damage. Katie has the rundown on their appeal to Gov. Tom Wolf — and his response — in this story.

• Artist Michelle Angela Ortiz, whose “Familias Separadas” public art project included an installation on the statehouse steps, focuses again on the facility in her documentary “Las Madres de Berks”. The half-hour film screened in Harrisburg and Lancaster last weekend; the next is in Philadelphia.

Best of the rest

Marie Cusick/ StateImpact Pennsylvania

The Fort Indiantown Gap National Guard training center in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania is the only known habitat for the Regal Fritillary butterfly in the eastern U.S.

• Lebanon County is home to the only habitat in the eastern U.S. for a rare butterfly, StateImpact Pennsylvania’s Marie Cusick discovered. You can learn all about it in just five minutes by watching Marie’s video here.

• About a thousand parents who owe at least $450 in unpaid school lunch bills recently got letters from a Luzerne County school district threatening court action over the debts that could lead to losing custody of their children. Mark Scolforo of the Associated Press has the full story.

• Pennsylvania’s state government spends more per capita than most other states, despite public employees making up a relatively small slice of the overall workforce. That’s but one factor that drives spending, though, according to this analysis from 24/7 Wall Street.

• Remember Willie Horton, the convicted killer whose story arguably cost Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis the 1988 presidential election? Horton was in prison for murder, but was allowed out under a generous weekend furlough program. On one of those furloughs, Horton committed an assault and rape. Fast forward to 2019 and Pennsylvania prosecutors and prison guards are calling for stricter parole terms for prisoners here, pointing to several recent cases where paroled criminals committed homicides. Read Associated Press reporter Marc Levy’s story here.