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The Trump administration subjected at least one person undertaking a hunger strike in immigrant detention to forcible medical treatment – engaging in medical practice that healthcare associations and international human rights groups have described as torture.
A document from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) health service agency, reviewed by the Guardian, confirms for the first time that the administration has used forced treatment on a hunger striker since Donald Trump began his second term. The document, published online in February by the ICE Health Service Corps (IHSC), discloses that an unnamed patient who began hunger strikes between October and December of last year and “was subject to force feeding, hydration, or forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws”.
It also notes that at least seven detained people were on hunger strike this February, and that IHSC has forecasted a total budget of $4,504.75 for “external medical care” of hunger strike patients and a total budget of $168,928.01 for the fiscal year of 2026 based on costs from last year.
“This revelation is shocking,” said Eunice Cho, an immigrant rights attorney who co-authored a 2021 report documenting the many medical complications that resulted from forced treatment for hunger strikers in ICE detention.
It remains unclear how many hunger strikers and forced treatments ICE has accounted for since February. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about what sort of forced treatment was administered to the detainee in the IHSC report.
This summer, hundreds of people staged hunger strikes at detention centers across the US. Trump officials have repeatedly denied that detainees are rejecting food to protest unsanitary conditions, medical neglect and what strikers have described as physical and psychological “torture” in detention facilities.
At least 300 detainees began a hunger and labor strike at the Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey from May to June, and their actions became a national flashpoint, and sustained crowds of protesters gathered outside the facility in solidarity. Advocates said the detainees ended their strike after facing retaliation. Meanwhile, attorneys with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) have said that hunger strikers at the Adelanto detention center in California have been zip-tied, threatened with teargas and were put in solitary confinement or transferred to other ICE facilities.
Sarah Houston, a managing attorney at ImmDef, said that ICE officials denied that her clients at Adelanto who staged hunger strikes were forgoing food. Officials also denied that detainees were facing retaliation for hunger striking, insisting that one of Houston’s clients who led a hunger strike at Adelanto faced disciplinary actions for vague facility violations.
The IHSC document is a “blatant admission” that the government is well aware of hunger strikes, 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.” she said. “Because no one goes on hunger strike unless they are really desperate.”
The IHSC document disclosing the number of hunger strikers and forced treatments covers the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, and was produced in response to the Senate appropriations committee – which in 2024 directed ICE to provide regular updates on the matter.
In a statement, the DHS said that “all detainees are provided with three meals a day” and did not engage with questions about whether ICE had forcibly treated any more hunger strikers since February.
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To forcibly treat a detained person on hunger strike, ICE must first seek an order from a federal judge. Often, said Cho, these orders amount to a “rubber stamp” because many detained immigrants lack attorneys to represent their interest in court. Once the order is obtained, the forced treatment can begin immediately. “There’s very little due process in these proceedings,” she said.
The forced treatment can cause a number of medical complications. Force-feeding, for instance, involves the insertion of a nasogastric tube through the nostril – a painful procedure that causes gagging or, in rare cases, the perforation of vital organs, according to the 2021 report. If the tube is misdirected because a patient is struggling or being treated under forced restraint, the procedure can cause serious infections.
Hunger strikes and subsequent force-feedings gained notoriety during the first Trump administration. A series of force-feedings took place at an ICE detention center in El Paso in 2019, overseen by a medical team contracted by ICE.
In 2022, the Intercept published the first-ever video of an ICE detainee being force-fed. It shows private security guards dressed in riot gear approaching an Indian asylum seeker named Ajay Kumar, and holding him down while medical staff inserted a feeding tube through the man’s nose and down his esophagus. After widespread criticism of ICE and its contractor’s tactics, ICE released Kumar and the three other hunger strikers from custody.
Force-feedings were internationally denounced in the early 2000s for their brutality, after detainees inside the Guantánamo military base were force-fed by guards after a hunger strike.
