“If they admit openly that there are hunger strikes,” said one lawyer, “they admit that the conditions in detention are so bad that people are willing to forgo food to raise awareness.”
D.H.S. Secretary Mullin at White House, May 2026. (C-Span video screenshot)
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams
The Trump administration subjected hunger-striking immigrants held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers to involuntary medical procedures, including forced feeding, a blatant and painful violation of medical ethics widely considered to be torture.
In the second article of a two-piece series, The Guardian revealed on Monday that court records showed ICE personnel attempted to subject at least 10 hunger-striking detainees to the procedures.
At least three, and possibly five, detainees were force-fed, while five others ended their hunger strikes at the last minute rather than undergo the invasive, non-consensual insertion of a plastic tube through the nose, down the throat and esophagus, and into the stomach to deliver liquid nutrition against their will.
Hundreds of people have gone on hunger strike at ICE detention centers across the country to protest overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, spoiled and worm-infested food and water, inadequate medical care, delays in immigration procedures, alleged physical and psychological torture, and other mistreatment.
The Guardian’s investigation found that one Kurdish asylum seeker detained at ICE’s Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, was subjected to force-feeding for eight months, while another hunger-striker at the same facility endured six months of the painful procedure. In six cases reviewed by The Guardian, immigrants who were force-fed had no legal representation.
The Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) maintains that detainees receive adequate meals and care and disputes reports of abuse.
In May, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed the hunger strikers as a “handful” of detainees and falsely claimed they were striking because they “want their ethnic right food.”
He added while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick looked on and smiled approvingly: “Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want… This isn’t Holiday Inn.”
DHS Secretary Mullin dismisses the detainee hunger strike in an ICE facility:
They’re refusing to eat because they want their ethnic food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want. This isn’t Holiday Inn. pic.twitter.com/tdUYMkUy1K
— FactPost (@factpostnews) May 27, 2026
A judge must authorize the forced feeding of ICE detainees. According to The Guardian, judges often quickly issue the requested emergency orders before immigrants can legally object.
“There’s very little due process in these proceedings,” immigrant rights attorney Eunice Cho told the newspaper, comparing the judges’ orders to a “rubber stamp.”
Force Feeding a Form of Torture
Global medical authorities, United Nations bodies, human rights defenders, and others — including people subjected to it—call forced feeding a form of torture.
“The tube went inside a little bit and then got stuck,” Ajay Kumar, a former ICE detainee force-fed during Trump’s first term in 2019, told The Intercept, which in 2022 obtained video of the Indian asylum seeker being strapped and pinned down by five guards in riot gear before having the nasogastric tube forced into him.
Kumar recalled:
“I felt as if [the tube] was going down my throat, tearing up the insides, and blood started coming from my mouth and nose…. It was very hard.”
“After that they took me for an X-ray. After doing the X-ray, they informed me that the tube has not been inserted properly, so we will have to insert it again.”
He was asked if he wanted to end his hunger strike and, when he said no, the second insertion began.
“It was more painful. These people are torturing me. The one ICE officer, I never forget him. He’s smiling.”
Kumar was taken for a second X-ray and was again informed that the tube was incorrectly inserted. He was again asked if he would continue his strike. He told them:
“You can torment me as much as you want, you won’t be able to break my spirits.”
The tube was correctly inserted the third time, and Kumar was pumped full of a nutritional shake. He said he could not breathe, sleep, or speak properly for weeks after.
Kumar said he was force-fed in front of three other detainees “so that they would all start eating after seeing what’s happening to me.”
He added:
“Whenever the doctors said, ‘Yes, we are helping you, we cannot let you die like this,’ I used to tell them, you are treating me worse than dying.”
Under the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta, doctors are advised to not force-feed prisoners who choose to hunger strike and understand the consequences of their actions.
“Forcible feeding is never ethically acceptable,” the declaration states.
25th commemoration of 1981 Irish hunger strike, 2006. (Patrice78500, CC-ASA-3.0)
In 1981, U.K. authorities allowed 10 imprisoned Irish Republican Army members, including former Member of Parliament Bobby Sands, to starve themselves to death in Northern Ireland. Their deaths occurred after between 46 and 73 days of refusing food.
In contrast, force-feeding is institutional policy in U.S. prisons, including the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp in Cuba, where detainees—most of whom were charged with no crime—were force-fed during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Immigrants detained by the U.S. have been force-fed since at least the Obama administration.
Sarah Houston, a managing attorney at ImmDef, told The Guardian that an ICE Health Service Corps document acknowledging the force-feeding of detainees and viewed by the newspaper is a “blatant admission” that the practice is being used by the Trump administration.
Houston said:
“But if they admit openly that there are hunger strikes, they admit that the conditions in detention are so bad that people are willing to forgo food in order to raise awareness about the situation … Because no one goes on hunger strike unless they are really desperate.”
Matthew Wynia, a medical ethicist and director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, said that “it is unethical to force treatment on someone who is saying, ‘Don’t do this to me.’”
Wynia continued:
“People who are on hunger strike do not want to die, they are not suicidal. They are using the only tool available to them to protest the circumstances of their confinement.”
“The idea of health professionals serving as agents of the state, rather than protectors of our patients, has a notorious history…. And for the medical profession, we really don’t want to go down that path again.”
The Guardian series comes amid a broader pattern of abuse and neglect, sometimes deadly, of ICE detainees, many of whom are locked up in facilities run by private prison profiteers.
According to ICE’s public database, more than 50 people have died while detained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency during President Donald Trump’s second term, including two people who were killed in a sniper attack on an ICE administrative and processing center in Dallas. At least 10 of the deaths were men who killed themselves, according to an Associated Press investigation published late last month.
Many of the deaths were preventable, say experts who point to systemic understaffing and D.H.S. policy choices that weaken detainee care and employee oversight.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer at Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Please Donate to
CN’s Summer
Fund Drive!
@drew:
methinks the “immigration problem” could be solved
if the global north stopped further exploiting the global south.
i.e. stopped turning countries there into what #47 ignorantly,
carelessly calls “shit-hole countries“ – unlivable hells on earth.
due to insatiable global northern greed,
and under conditions of modern slavery, resources are depleted,
raw materials are extracted, water is being robbed and/or polluted,
add to that: land grabbing, pseudo free trade agreements to the
detriment of the south, brutal dictators being kept in place to make
people’s lives more miserable, beyond their economic hardships.
not to forget the endless proxy wars that are being waged.
also, the south has to bear the brunt of the globe overheating
while WE global northerners contribute MOST to the phenomenon
with our carefree lifestyle in enjoy-stuff-and-waste-land …
problem here:
if global southern countries were allowed to live like we do,
they’d claim their resources WE claim for THEMSELVES.
in 1960, when congo celebrated its independence from belgium,
whose crown colony it had been since 1908!, patrice lumumba
told the honorable assembly that congo would, as of now, use
its resources for its own good, before sharing them with others.
INCONCEIVABLE to the global northerners!
so lumumba was assassinated in 1961, hacked to pieces, dissolved
in acid, to prevent a cult of martyrs. his former ally, mobutu sese seko,
was made president for life, in recognition of his betrayal. what congo –
among the resource-richest countries in africa – looks like today,
bc the global north is STILL NOT SATISFIED, we all know.
while we realize that the people’s republic of congo is by no means the only example of the destruction, devastation, despair, and death we
cause in faraway lands – and via ICE now … on US soil, too.
As my past posts in this comment section indicate, I am wholeheartedly in favor of getting our arms completely around our totally run amok illegal immigration problem. Since all this problem does is depress wages, increase housing costs, and stress social services. African-American citizens and Chicano citizens are often hurt most of all.
However, the executive function must be carried out and accomplished humanely.
We desperately need a special law enforcement agency whose sole task is to investigate and charge with serious felonies the landlords/real estate firms that rent and sell to illegals and the employers (informal off the books employers most importantly, after all that’s where most illegals work) who hire and profit gouge off illegal immigrant labor.
Let’s not forget, a segment of our parasitic financial ruling class greatly desires a less homogenous nation as they understand a more heterogeneous nation is less likely to rebel against their exploitations. These financial parasites get paranoid in a more homogeneous nation.