They're fighting to stop Izzy Aly from dying in a Pennsylvania gulag
A potentially fatal case of neglect for a Pa. immigrant detainee spotlights a nationwide humanitarian crisis.
Meetings of Clearfield County’s commissioners are said to be typically as placid as the thick oak forests and cold mountain streams of this isolated slice of Pennsylvania North Country, some 25 miles west of State College.
Not so on Tuesday night. Protesters from the county and from as far away as Pittsburgh carried signs like “ICE = American Gestapo,” and there was an uproar when a prominent community activist was not allowed to speak because she lives just across the county line.
But the most powerful voice spoke for only 13 seconds — and was not even in the room. From behind the thick plexiglass that separates Clearfield County’s undulating foothills from its desperate detainees trapped in an American gulag archipelago, Izzy Ally was pleading for his life.
Aly’s supporters fear it may be a matter of days, if nothing is done.
“There is no question that my situation is precarious, to say the least,” the Egyptian-born Aly said from inside Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention site run by a private contractor, in a taped phone call to a supporter back in his adopted home of Florida.
“Please do something. Don’t let people die in silence. Find your conscience, and if you don’t do so in time, then avenge our preventable deaths in the courts.”
The precarious situation that the 40-year-old Aly is referring to is advanced Stage 3 kidney failure, which went unrevealed for the first two months of his Kafkaesque journey through ICE detention and which — Aly has told his supporters in monitored calls and messages — prison officials continue to downplay or flat-out ignore, even as his urine turns red from the worsening disease.
“I think it’s an eye-opener,” said Aly’s close friend J. Mark Barfield, who met him in Central Florida through activism in the Libertarian Party and who has thrown himself completely into a fight against their ideology’s worst fear: An individual getting crushed by a repressive state.
“We all read the stories about horrors of ICE, and there’s brutality in Minnesota and places like that.” But, he said, it’s something else when your friend and neighbor is “an innocent being held by the system.”
Eye-opener is a gross understatement.
You’ve probably been seeing videos of this week’s chaotic protests in Newark outside an ICE detention site, Delaney Hall, that is run by the same private corporation managing Moshannon Valley, the GEO Group. There, detainees have also complained about a similar crisis of medical neglect, overcrowding, and rancid food.
You may have heard that a wave of detainee hunger strikes — which reportedly began with a brief protest last month at Moshannon Valley — is jumping like a western wildfire from Delaney Hall to ICE facilities in California, New Mexico, and Washington state, where locked-up migrants have formed a Union of People Kidnapped by ICE.
You may also have read that the majority of those nabbed by ICE or other federal agents have no prior criminal record, as advocates say was the case for 87% of the 1,650 inmates jamming Moshannon Valley to near capacity earlier this year.
No one embodies this warped situation more than Aly. Just over five months ago he was a healthy, thriving engineer and book-writing marketing expert with a diploma from the University of Central Florida (yes, that UCF) and a network of friends in the Libertarian Party with whom he loved to debate American politics, even though — as a green-card applicant — he was unable to vote.
Today, the boyish-looking Aly, smiling at the camera from the other side of his stolen liberty, is the all-too- human face of why those protesters in the industrial badlands of Newark are facing down pepper spray and pepper shots, why detained immigrants from a gumbo of nations are refusing to eat, and why the United States is turning 250 as a global pariah of senseless inhumanity.
Aly’s life-or-death battle now has a bunch of regular folks in Clearfield County — where more than 75% of voters pulled the lever for Donald Trump after a campaign drenched in xenophobia — raising their own voices for him and the plight of his fellow detainees. It’s the fulfillment of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign-trail mantra, to fight for someone they don’t even know.
» READ MORE: From Big Lots to warehousing humans: ICE plan sparks fear in Schuylkill County
“Until all of us are free,” Bobbi Jo Erickson, the local Indivisible Mayday activist who was blocked from addressing the Clearfield commissioners Tuesday, told me, echoing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “none of us are free.”
Reporters seeking answers from ICE officials or the GEO Group about Aly’s case — advocates say his longstanding green card application was recently rejected — and his medical complaints have been unable to get a response. I emailed ICE’s Philadelphia field office Thursday and have not yet heard back. Trump’s new Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, claimed at a Wednesday cabinet meeting that hunger strikes are about not getting “ethnic food,” adding: “This isn’t Holiday Inn.”
Again, this would be an understatement bordering on misdirection.
Erickson, the political activist who lives just across the line in Jefferson County, told me about her multiple visits to Moshannon Valley, the largest ICE detention site on the Eastern seaboard. Through those two inches of plexiglass at a prison for people who’ve mostly committed no crime, she said she hears “the same things over and over and over,” regardless of nationality or native language.
“There’s egregious lack of access to medical care,” Erickson said. “The food is not nutritional. I frequently hear that it makes the people ill... Another thing I hear over and over again is the amount of weight loss is substantial” — so much so that some are on medications to gain weight.
Accidents of geography and fate dumped Aly into this hellscape. Barfield said that after his student visa to attend UCF expired, the Egyptian national — whose full name is Islam Mahmoud Aly — played by the rules and was given parole status by the State Department to fly back to Egypt twice, for his mother’s funeral and to settle his father’s estate. But last fall his return trip was reportedly delayed by struggles to renew his passport, and when he finally flew into Philadelphia on Dec. 23, airport immigration agents arrested him and sent him to rural detention days later.
Barfield said that a blood test at Aly’s detention intake revealed that he was suffering from advanced kidney disease, and yet he wasn’t told about it for a couple of months. Even then, “they’ve in effect really done little or nothing about it,” he said, explaining that while he was taken once to an outside doctor, a follow-up visit to a nephrologist was cancelled because no one at Moshannon Valley had performed a needed blood test.
Doctors suggested, according to Barfield, that Aly start a no-salt diet, “but he just gets whatever stuff, to use a polite word...And they just tell him to drink more water” — the same thing Aly related that they told him in recent days as his urine turned reddish, the color of blood.
His medical struggles are not unique. Two detainees — Frankline Okpu and Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir — have died from medical distress at Moshannon Valley since 2023, and a third death, of Chaofeng Ge, was ruled an apparent suicide although some activists dispute that.
In Clearfield, activists have for months been urging the county — which gets about $200,000 a year from GEO Group, currently the rural county’s third-largest employer after its schools and medical center — not to renew its contract when it expires later this year.
Sherilyn Sheets, who moved to the area from Chicago three years ago to be near family, read a statement about Aly and played his recording for commissioners when Erickson was barred from speaking.
She told me that “knowing that there’s a concentration camp in my backyard and there are people organizing to speak out against that, to me it’s just a no-brainer to join that.”
Their ranks are steadily growing, even in the beating heart of Trump County, where Facebook posts about the detention center still draw hateful anti-immigrant rants. But Erickson said she’s finding that minds can be changed. She related one recent encounter as she was going door-to-door with brochures and a petition about Moshannon Valley, when a man wearing a veterans-for-MAGA hat in a truck with an American flag hanging off the back asked her what she was doing.
She said her brochure initially inspired a Fox News-flavored diatribe about criminal immigrants and migrant caravans, but when Erickson patiently explained that the overwhelming number of detainees have no criminal record and that the government spends as much as $5.5 million a month to lock them up, the man grew silent.
“They just took away my food stamps,” he finally said. Then he signed the petition.
Now, some 17 months into Trump’s mass-deportation regime that has filled Moshannon Valley, Delaney Hall, and other dots on the archipelago to the brim, that Pennsylvania veteran joined a growing number of Americans realizing that a slow-boiling humanitarian crisis is about to explode from coast to coast.
The growing stories of medical neglect are the inevitable consequence of mass arrests and cut-rate detention sites, with warehouse concentration camps waiting in the wings. Anne Frank died of typhus. Now Aly is dying from kidney disease — unless enough folks from the backstreets of Newark to the woodlands of central Pennsylvania fight back with our voices and our own bodies. We should not — cannot — wait until Aly dies to avenge what is happening here.
Until Izzy Aly is free, none of us are free.
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