A federal judge in Texas quietly gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement permission to surgically cut into a detained Cuban man's abdomen and insert a feeding tube without his consent, court records obtained by the Guardian reveal. The man had been on a hunger strike for weeks inside a privately-run detention center near Houston. This is not a dystopian short story. This happened in August.
What ICE Actually Did Here
Let's be precise about what we're talking about, because the euphemisms will try to soften it and they shouldn't. A man arrested by ICE on July 22 declared a hunger strike three days later. Rather than address whatever conditions drove him to stop eating, federal officials went to court and got permission to perform a "percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy" on him against his will.
For those of you who didn't go to medical school: that's a surgery where staff make an incision in a person's abdomen, insert a tube that stays there permanently until they surgically remove it, and pump liquid directly into the stomach. The Guardian reports this surgical procedure has not appeared in any previously reviewed force-feeding case. ICE apparently found a new level.
Federal judge Andrew Hanen first approved the force-feeding request on August 19. ICE came back on September 1 and asked for an extension. Hanen granted it this week, with the order set to expire in mid-September. The extended order explicitly includes the option to use the surgical tube. So the clock is still running.
The Number That Should Stop You Cold
This man is, according to the Guardian's count, likely the 19th hunger striker in ICE detention for whom the agency has received court approval to conduct involuntary medical procedures since January 2025. Nineteen. In roughly twenty months.
Immigrant rights attorney Eunice Cho, who has spent years documenting forced treatment in ICE detention, told the Guardian that the volume of cases "suggests several possibilities, none of which are positive." Either conditions have gotten bad enough that dramatically more people are hunger striking in protest, or officials are skipping any attempt at resolution and going straight to physical force. Or, Cho implies, both.
The secretive nature of these proceedings makes it nearly impossible to know which. The majority of court records in force-feeding cases are sealed. The public learns what it learns through documents like the ones the Guardian managed to obtain. The rest stays hidden, which is, of course, the point.
No Lawyer, No Problem (For ICE)
The Cuban man at the center of this case has no legal representation. None. The government moved to have a surgery performed on him against his will, in a sealed court proceeding, and he faced it without an attorney.
"The fact that this person lacks legal representation in a process where the government seeks to subject him to an invasive, involuntary medical procedure performed without consent is a tragedy, and a clear failure of our justice system," Cho told the Guardian. That's about as measured a way as you can put it. The man was on his own while ICE and a federal prosecutor argued in court that they should be allowed to cut into his body.
The facility holding him is the Montgomery ICE Processing Center, run by the private prison company GEO Group. GEO Group referred all questions to ICE. The US attorney's office representing ICE in these proceedings did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment. Everyone is very busy not answering questions about the man they want to operate on without his permission.
The Government's Talking Points, and What They Don't Cover
The Department of Homeland Security told the Guardian on Thursday evening that the man had "resumed eating and drinking again" and was not currently being force-fed. That's the whole statement. DHS did not say whether he broke his hunger strike this week because of the new court order looming over him. They didn't say how many times he was force-fed before that. They offered the good-news headline and nothing else.
DHS also provided background on the man's immigration history, noting he entered the US unlawfully in 1980, was ordered deported in 2004, and has prior criminal convictions. This is the standard play: release the arrest record to shift the story from "government approved stomach surgery without consent" to "actually he's a bad guy." The criminal history of a hunger striker does not change what a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy is, or what it means to perform one on someone who said no.
Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, was direct with the Guardian: "The cruelty of the extreme tactics at ICE's disposal to end lawful protest, including forcibly cutting into a protester's body to insert a tube in their stomach, underscores the horrors happening outside our view in ICE detention centers." Hunger striking is, legally speaking, a protected form of protest. ICE's answer to it is apparently surgery.
What Force-Feeding Actually Looks Like
The Guardian describes the standard procedure because it is important not to let the clinical language do the work of distancing us from what is physically happening. Guards hold the person down. Medical staff push a tube through their nose and down their throat. Nutritional liquid gets pumped into their stomach. Human rights organizations have widely condemned this as torture.
The surgical option approved in this latest case goes further than the nasal tube. It is more invasive, it is permanent until a second surgery removes it, and it was authorized for use on a man who has no lawyer and whose court records are almost entirely sealed from public view. The ACLU and immigration attorneys have been raising alarms about the escalating number of these cases for months. Those alarms have not slowed the pace of approvals.
The Dingo Take
Nineteen people. A federal court has signed off on invasive, nonconsensual medical procedures against nineteen hunger strikers in ICE detention in less than two years. The courts are not acting as a check on this. They are the mechanism through which it gets done.
There is a word for strapping someone down and forcing tubes into their body to stop them from using the only form of protest available to them inside a locked facility with no lawyer and sealed court records. The word is not "medical procedure." The human rights community settled on its word a long time ago, and the United States is doing it nineteen times and counting, in private detention centers run by companies like GEO Group, authorized by federal judges, requested by the same administration that ran on the promise to get tough on the right people.
The DHS announcement that he has "resumed eating" is supposed to be the happy ending. But a man resumed eating after a judge gave the government permission to surgically install a feeding tube in his abdomen without his consent. Call that whatever you want. Just don't call it justice, and don't pretend the sealed records and the unanswered press inquiries and the nineteen court orders are a coincidence. Someone decided the public shouldn't see this clearly. They were probably right that we wouldn't like it.
Comments