Activists plan Lewisburg vigil for immigrants detained at FCI Lewisburg

Activists gathered outside FCI Lewisburg’s main gate to highlight the immigrants being held inside the federal prison, with organizers saying more than 150 detainees were there, including people with pending asylum cases. The SUN Immigrant Community Support Group said the Saturday vigil at 3 p.m. was centered on dignity, prayer and due process, and it was meant to launch a five-day Witness Walk from Lewisburg to Harrisburg, along with a Sunday walk from Lewisburg to Sunbury.

The gathering put Union County’s most visible federal institution at the center of a broader immigration fight. FCI Lewisburg is now a medium-security federal correctional institution with an adjacent minimum-security satellite camp, and the Bureau of Prisons says the name change from USP to FCI reflected the facility’s updated mission and security level. ICE, which oversees immigration detention, has used Lewisburg as one of the federal facilities holding detainees, placing the prison inside the agency’s enforcement network even as the BOP continues to operate the site.

That overlap has drawn scrutiny before. A September 2024 report from the DOJ Office of the Inspector General said Lewisburg was dealing with staffing shortages, healthcare problems, infrastructure issues, restrictive-housing concerns, suicide-prevention lapses and professionalism problems among employees. The report said the prison’s Correctional Services Department was staffed at 191 of 245 authorized positions as of Jan. 14, 2024, or 78 percent, and warned that Lewisburg’s expanding mission as a regional transport hub for inmates in the Northeast could intensify those strains.

For organizers and their allies, the vigil was as much about public accountability as it was about prayer. The Lewisburg Prison Project, which began in 1973 after concerns about conditions at the prison, has spent decades focusing on confinement conditions, legal resources and civil rights issues tied to the facility. That long history gives the current immigration detention debate a local lineage, rooted in the same prison that opened in 1932 as the first penitentiary built by the Bureau of Prisons.

The event also connected Lewisburg to a larger regional wave of immigration activism across central and northeastern Pennsylvania. ICE offers a public Online Detainee Locator System that runs around the clock and is available in multiple languages, a tool families and attorneys can use while detainees are held inside the federal system. For Union County, the vigil turned a national detention policy into a local scene at the prison gate, with the next steps carried on foot toward Harrisburg and Sunbury.