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A young man locked up in a notorious U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention center in Pennsylvania took his life on Tuesday by hanging himself, according to a release from the government and communications between first responders reviewed by The Intercept. His is the first known death in ICE detention facilities in the Northeast this fiscal year.
The facility where the suicide occurred is the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a privately run immigration jail in an isolated, rural area about 300 miles west of New York City. Since President Donald Trump began his second term, the detention center has become a major warehouse for immigrants apprehended by ICE in and around New York and Philadelphia.
The dead man was 32-year-old Chaofeng Ge, originally from China. He was living in New York City last year when he was arrested in Pennsylvania for trying to use credit card numbers that did not belong to him to buy gift cards at a CVS Pharmacy. According to an ICE statement released late Wednesday after The Intercept’s inquiry, he pleaded guilty and was handed over to ICE by local authorities.
Ge had been detained at the Moshannon detention facility, which is run by the private prison firm GEO Group, for five days before taking his own life. (GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira referred questions to ICE.)
The largest ICE detention center in the Northeast, the Moshannon Valley Processing Center opened in 2021 and, by 2023, it was drawing scores of complaints about abusive conditions. Among other complaints, detainees and civil rights advocates noted a serious lack of language services and an oppressive environment that seemed more like a prison for convicted criminals than a temporary holding center for immigrants.
“Language translation services are really lacking, so people feel isolated.”An immigrant who was incarcerated at Moshannon Valley Processing Center in late 2023 and later released told The Intercept that he remains in touch with detainees who are still there. He said that being jailed at Moshannon is especially hard on detainees who are Chinese.
“Language translation services are really lacking, so people feel isolated,” said the immigrant, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from immigration authorities. “And after they are judged removable, ICE takes five or six months to collect enough of them to fill a deportation flight for China. The stress of the waiting is bad.”
Ge was last seen alive at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday and was discovered an hour later hanging by a ligature in a shower room, in cardiac arrest, according to recordings on Broadcastify, an archive of communications among first responders nationwide. He was “cut down,” as first responders put it, administered CPR, and subjected to other aggressive medical interventions. Ge was pronounced dead at about 6 a.m.
“Unnecessary and Cruel”
Among ongoing problems at many ICE detention centers, the Moshannon immigration jail is especially notorious.
ICE pays the GEO Group, one of the two private prison giants in the country and a major immigration detention contractor, over $3 million a month to run the Moshannon jail. The facility has over 1,800 beds, putting it on the larger side of ICE jails.
Since the Trump administration started increasing arrests of immigrants — including many with no criminal histories — those beds have been filling up. Detainee populations nationwide have risen at least 25 percent since Trump was inaugurated, and the Moshannon jail is now the largest immigration detention center in the Northeast. The speed of its growth risks creating dangerous conditions for detainees, including crowding and lack of sufficient medical and mental health resources.
Responding to the complaints, the Department of Homeland Security started investigating in 2024. In a memo, the agency’s Civil Rights and Civil Liberties office acknowledged receiving 88 complaints about the facility, including a 59-page memo, prepared in part by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania that described “egregious and unconstitutional conditions.”
One of the examples presented by the ACLU in its suit on the “unnecessary and cruel” detention concerned a man who became so depressed at the Moshannon jail that he attempted to take his own life.
The Homeland Security civil rights office then wrote to ICE that it would be going onsite to do an investigation. The civil rights office subsequently drafted a findings and recommendations report and noted that it had been submitted to ICE. Then the report sank into oblivion, as the Trump administration largely shuttered the Department of Homeland Security’s oversight office earlier this year.
Fiscal years run from October to the end of September. From last October until late June of this year, 12 people nationwide had died in ICE facilities — more than the total deaths in all of the last fiscal year, with three months remaining in this cycle. It was the highest number of ICE detainee deaths since the Covid pandemic in 2020.
Among the 12 deaths were at least two suicides. Ge’s death at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center was the third.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing difficulties or those close to them, by chat or by telephone at 988.
The post Chinese ICE Detainee Dies by Suicide at Pennsylvania Detention Center appeared first on The Intercept.
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