PHILADELPHIA — An ICE detainee was found hanging by his neck in a shower room at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center on Tuesday morning and pronounced dead shortly afterward, the agency said late Wednesday night.

Chaofeng Ge, 32, a Chinese national, had been in ICE custody for five days, and was awaiting a hearing before the Executive Office for Immigration Review, ICE said. He was pronounced dead by the Clearfield County coroner at 6:03 a.m.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday night that the cause of Ge’s death was under investigation.

He was found in the shower room of his detention pod at 5:21 a.m. Tuesday by staff members, officials said. They immediately lowered him to the ground, began CPR, and contacted Emergency Medical Services, the Pennsylvania State Police, and the coroner’s office, ICE said.

Even before ICE announced the death, word of a suspected suicide at the giant central Pennsylvania detention center flashed through Philadelphia immigration circles. A coalition of immigrant-advocate groups, united as the Shut Down Detention Campaign, held an online news conference Thursday at which they called for the closure of Moshannon and other centers.

They said isolation and difficult conditions, coupled with recent reports of overcrowding and insufficient food, put detainee lives at risk. They shared a 2024 study on the center, conducted by the Social Justice Lawyering Clinic at Temple University, which cited detainee reports on a range of issues, from inability to access medical care to physical and psychological abuse by staff members.

Ge had been arrested on Jan. 23 by Lower Paxton Township police and charged with criminal use of a communication facility, unlawful use of a computer, and access device fraud, ICE said.

Criminal Use of a Communication Facility is a third-degree felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. It involves using a device to transmit signals, writing, images or sound to bring about the commission of a felony.

Lower Paxton police said they had been dispatched to a Harrisburg CVS drug store for a report of a man using fraudulent credit cards in an attempt to purchase gift cards. There they found Ge, of Flushing, N.Y., with numerous stolen credit card numbers in his cell phone, authorities said.

Ge was arrested, charged, and arraigned the same day. He was taken to the Dauphin County Prison after he was unable to post bail, set at $150,000, according to police.

The next day, Jan. 24, the Philadelphia Enforcement and Removal Operations’ York sub-office lodged an immigration detainer with the prison.

ICE detainers are agency-issued requests, usually made to jails and prisons, to hold someone until agents can arrive to make an arrest — often past the time a person might normally be released.

On July 31, Ge pleaded guilty to accessing a device issued to another who did not authorize use, and to conspiracy to commit the same. He was sentenced to six to 12 months for each count and granted immediate release to the ICE detainer, the agency said.

York-based ICE officers took Ge into custody, and transported him to the York ICE office for processing. He was later transferred to Moshannon.

The processing center is a private immigration prison operated by the Florida-based GEO Group Inc. It’s located near Philipsburg, northwest of State College, Pa., where its 1,876 beds make it by far the largest of four ICE detention centers in Pennsylvania.

In June it held an average daily population of 1,320, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration data.

Christopher Ferreira, director of corporate relations at GEO Group, referred questions about Ge’s death to ICE. The Moshannon facility administrator, Lenny Oddo, did not reply to an email seeking information. Clearfield County Coroner Kim Shaffer-Snyder did not respond to a phone message.

The immigration-advocacy groups called on the Clearfield County Commissioners to end the contract between the county, ICE and the GEO Group that enables detentions at Moshannon. The Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, Detention Watch Network, Juntos, and others took part.

“This is a really sad day,” said Adrianna Torres-Garcia, deputy director of the Philadelphia-based Free Migration Project. “One man died, but many more are locked inside.”

Activists questioned the rapid expansion of the ICE budget, which they said was central to President Donald Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations.

The Republican-led Congress recently set aside about $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security, including $75 billion in extra funding for ICE.

“Good people in the community are embarrassed by the facility,” said Indivisible: Mayday cofounder Bobbi Erickson, who lives about 30 miles from Moshannon and called it “a for-profit human-rights violation.”

ICE said it notified the Chinese Embassy of the death.

The agency noted that it’s required to make public its reports on an in-custody death within 90 days. Those can be found on the agency Detainee Death Reporting page.

Those records indicate that 13 people died in custody in fiscal year 2025. The figure was 12 the previous year, and a total of seven died in the combined years of 2023 and 2022, according to ICE.

“ICE remains committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments,” the agency said in confirming the death at Moshannon. “Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay. … At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care.”

Nationally, as of June 27, ICE confined 56,945 immigrants in centers across the country. That’s up from 39,238 whenTrump took office in January, promising to deport millions of people.

GEO Group provides what it calls turnkey solutions for governments worldwide, offering a spectrum of correctional and community-reentry services.

Its operations include 97 secure facilities, processing centers, and community reentry centers that encompass about 74,000 beds, including projects currently under development.

“It is the mission of the Moshannon Valley Processing Center,” the company says on its website, “to provide the highest level of service to our client; our primary objective being to ensure the safety of the community, staff, and those entrusted into our custody.”

In February, GEO Group announced it had been awarded a $1 billion, 15-year contract by ICE to establish a federal detention center at 1,000-bed Delaney Hall in Newark.

Four months later, Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker called conditions there untenable, citing security lapses, reports of mistreatment of detainees, and complaints of food shortages.

“It’s clear that GEO Group has shown it cannot — or will not — operate Delaney Hall humanely or safely,” the senator said.

©2025 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Visit at inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.