The Trump administration didn't just ignore hunger strikers in immigration detention. According to a government document reviewed by the Guardian, they strapped at least one of them down and forced a tube through their nose. Healthcare associations and international human rights groups have a word for that: torture.
The Document They Didn't Mean You to Notice
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Health Service Corps published a report online back in February. Quietly. No press release. No announcement. The kind of document that gets buried in a federal website and never sees daylight unless someone is specifically looking for it.
The Guardian found it. And what it says is damning. An unnamed detainee who began hunger striking between October and December of last year was, in the agency's own words, "subject to force feeding, hydration, or forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws." That's the government's own accounting of what it did to a person who stopped eating to protest their conditions.
The document also notes that at least seven people were on hunger strike as of this February. ICE has budgeted $4,504.75 for "external medical care" of hunger strike patients this quarter, and $168,928.01 for the full fiscal year. They've run the math on how many people they're planning to forcibly treat. It's in the spreadsheet.
What Force-Feeding Actually Involves
Let's be specific about what "forced treatment" means, because the bureaucratic language is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Force-feeding involves inserting a nasogastric tube through a person's nostril and down into their stomach. It causes gagging. It's painful under the best circumstances. According to a 2021 report co-authored by immigrant rights attorney Eunice Cho, if the tube is misdirected because the patient is struggling or physically restrained, it can cause organ perforation and serious infection.
And these patients are being physically restrained. We know this because in 2022, the Intercept published the first-ever video of an ICE detainee being force-fed. The footage shows private security guards in full riot gear pinning down Ajay Kumar, an Indian asylum seeker, while medical staff push a feeding tube through his nose. ICE released Kumar and three other hunger strikers after the public backlash.
This is not a clinical procedure administered in a quiet hospital room. It's guards in riot gear and a tube down your throat because you stopped eating to protest conditions in a detention facility. "This revelation is shocking," Cho told the Guardian.
The Denials Aren't Holding Up
Here's where it gets especially infuriating. Trump officials have spent months flatly denying that detainees are even on hunger strikes. The Department of Homeland Security told the Guardian that "all detainees are provided with three meals a day" and refused to engage with questions about whether ICE has forcibly treated any additional hunger strikers since February.
At the Adelanto detention center in California, attorneys with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center say ICE officials denied that their clients were forgoing food at all. Those same officials denied any retaliation was occurring, even as hunger strikers were reportedly being zip-tied, threatened with teargas, thrown in solitary confinement, or transferred to other facilities.
So the agency simultaneously claims no one is on hunger strike, has budgeted nearly $170,000 to deal with hunger strike patients this fiscal year, and has confirmed in its own paperwork that it force-fed at least one of them. Managing attorney Sarah Houston put it plainly to the Guardian: the IHSC document is "a blatant admission" that the government knows exactly what is happening. "No one goes on hunger strike unless they are really desperate," she said.
This Summer's Strikes Were Everywhere
This isn't a handful of isolated cases. The Guardian reports that hundreds of detainees staged hunger strikes at detention centers across the country this summer. At Delaney Hall in New Jersey, at least 300 people launched a hunger and labor strike that ran from May into June, drawing sustained crowds of protesters outside the facility.
Advocates say those detainees eventually ended their strike after facing retaliation. The pattern is consistent: people stop eating to protest what they describe as unsanitary conditions, medical neglect, and psychological abuse. Officials deny the strikes are happening. Then the strikes end, usually after some combination of threats, transfers, and isolation. Occasionally, a government document surfaces that confirms what officials were denying.
That is exactly what happened here.
The Legal Process Is a Rubber Stamp
There is technically a legal process that ICE must follow before force-feeding someone. The agency has to obtain an order from a federal judge. That sounds like a safeguard. In practice, Eunice Cho told the Guardian, it functions as a rubber stamp.
The reason is simple: most detained immigrants don't have lawyers. When ICE seeks a force-feeding order, there is frequently no attorney present to argue the other side. "There's very little due process in these proceedings," Cho said. A judge signs off, and the procedure begins immediately.
This is not a new problem. Force-feedings during the first Trump administration became a flashpoint in 2019, when a series of procedures took place at an ICE facility in El Paso. The practice was internationally condemned in the early 2000s when detainees at Guantanamo Bay were force-fed after a hunger strike there. The world decided then that this crossed a line. The current administration apparently filed that away as a suggestion.
The Dingo Take
The Trump administration has spent the better part of a year telling anyone who would listen that there are no hunger strikes in ICE detention, that everyone is getting three square meals a day, that the detainees raising alarms about their conditions are simply wrong. And then their own agency quietly published a document confirming it force-fed, forcibly hydrated, and catheterized a hunger striker. In writing. With a budget line.
This is the move authoritarian governments have always made: deny reality loudly and publicly while the paperwork tells a different story and gets buried on a government website. The only reason we know about this is because a journalist at the Guardian went looking. The Senate appropriations committee technically directed ICE to produce these reports back in 2024, so this document exists because of congressional oversight that the current administration would very much prefer didn't apply to them.
Force-feeding hunger strikers is torture. Not in a loose, rhetorical sense, but in the specific, technical sense that medical associations and human rights organizations have defined it. The World Medical Association prohibits it. International human rights law treats it as a form of cruel and degrading treatment. The United States government is doing it to people who are not criminals, who have not been convicted of any crime, who stopped eating because they were desperate enough to think starving themselves was their best available option. And then billing it out at $168,928 a year.
