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Democratic congressional representatives are pressing for more information regarding the contract and operations of Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County, the largest immigrant detention center in the Northeast.

Emily Neal from our friends at WHYY has more.

The pressure comes as Clearfield County commissioners voted to grant a six-month extension of a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and GEO Group, the private prison company that owns and operates the facility.

Representative Mary Gay Scanlon says she and other Democrats are requesting details about the contract.

Questions about what to do with this building, how and if it should be preserved, continue to be floating around and presented over the years.

I went inside this building once as a reporter for WHYY, and I remember feeling feeling like I was stuck in the seventies and it was very much 2018, 2019.

So it felt dated even when

I went in there.

It's a major reason why I ended up here.

Now, thankfully, WHYY in Philadelphia stepped in and said, we'll buy the station and operate it.

It's not going to be the size that it was or offer all of the services that it offered, but we'll continue to have a local staff there.

And that process is almost complete now.

We saw a huge number of people step up and say, this is a critical service to our community.

And so the growth in membership, the number of people, and obviously the amount that people were giving all made a significant difference there.

In fact, it's one of the reasons why WHYY was willing to take on ownership of WPSU was they felt like there was both a great outpouring of support from the community and the potential for even greater support from the community to keep that going.

At the same time, similar to what many stations have seen across the country, there was a group of people who I think initially stepped up and said, all right, and got very excited about But over time, that has cooled a little bit, right? Some people have said, well, you're still here.

I have met people over and again.

For the podcast, The Statue with WHYY, our first episode, we talked to a man who had fled the Taliban in Afghanistan, and he chose Philadelphia in part because of Rocky.

And then he was here seeking treatment for his daughter at Children's Hospital.

And he would go to the Rocky statue every day as a moment of meditation and reflection.