A Guardian Investigation Found ICE Force-Fed Hunger-Striking Detainees — Restraining Them and Pushing a Tube Through the Nose Into the Stomach, One Kurdish Asylum Seeker for Eight Months, an Afghan Man Daily for Nearly Six — Using Court Orders, on People With No Lawyers, to Break Strikes Protesting Worm-Infested Food and Medical Neglect. Doctors and the UN Call It Torture

A hunger strike is one of the few forms of protest available to a person with nothing left — no freedom, no lawyer, no vote, only the ability to refuse food and make their suffering visible. The response of the Trump administration to people who did that in its custody was not to address why they were starving themselves. It was to restrain them and force a tube down their throats, for months.

What the records show

A Guardian investigation, built on court records, found that the administration attempted to subject at least 10 hunger-striking ICE detainees to involuntary medical procedures, including force-feeding. Of those:

• At least three, and possibly five, were actually force-fed
• Five others ended their hunger strikes at the last moment — rather than undergo the procedure

Force-feeding is not a metaphor and not a meal. It is the physical act of restraining a person and pushing a tube through the nose, down the esophagus, and into the stomach to pump in liquid nutrition against their will. Done to a resisting person, it is violent, painful, and — by the near-universal judgment of medical bodies — a form of abuse.

The durations

The cruelty here is measured not in incidents but in months:

• A Kurdish asylum seeker at ICE's Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, was force-fed for eight months
• Another hunger-striker at the same facility endured the procedure for six months
• An Afghan man was force-fed daily for nearly six months — from September 2025 through March 2026

Eight months of having a tube forced into your stomach is not medical care and not the prevention of a one-time crisis. It is a sustained, repeated assault, administered day after day, to a person the government is holding.

By court order, to people with no lawyers

Two details turn this from horror into system. First, ICE did not act in some legal void — it obtained court orders authorizing the force-feeding, building a paper architecture of legitimacy around the practice. Second, in six of the cases the Guardian reviewed, the detainees being force-fed had no legal representation at all. The people most invasively acted upon by the state were the people least able to contest it — no lawyer to argue against the order, to document the harm, to make the case that a competent adult's refusal of food is a right, not a medical emergency to be overridden. Some were also thrown into solitary confinement.

What they were protesting

Remember what a hunger strike is for. Hundreds of people have gone on hunger strike across ICE's detention network, and the records of what they were protesting read as an indictment of the conditions themselves:

• Overcrowded and unsanitary detention
• Spoiled and worm-infested food and water
• Inadequate medical care
• Interminable delays in their immigration cases
• Alleged physical and psychological abuse

Sit with the logic. People refused to eat because the food was rotten and the care was denied and the treatment was abusive. The government's answer was to force-feed them — to compel, through a tube and by court order, the very act of consumption they were refusing in protest of how they were being treated. The response to a protest against abuse was a more invasive form of abuse. It does not resolve the grievance; it overrides the only leverage the grieving had, and calls it care.

The word for it is torture

This is not a contested characterization at the fringes. It is the settled position of the people who define medical ethics and international law:

• The World Medical Association holds that force-feeding a competent hunger striker is never ethically acceptable — its Declarations of Tokyo and Malta bar physicians from participating in it, precisely because it turns medicine into an instrument of coercion
• United Nations human-rights experts have long held that force-feeding detainees against their will constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that can rise to the level of torture

Human-rights organizations reviewing the ICE records reached the same conclusion, and nearly 50 Democratic lawmakers have called for a watchdog investigation into the practice. The Department of Homeland Security disputes the reports, maintaining that detainees receive adequate meals and care — a denial that sits awkwardly against the detainees' own accounts of worm-infested food, and against the court records documenting the tubes.

The pattern it completes

This does not stand alone. It is the latest and most literal entry in a record of cruelty that this administration has built into a system — the family separations, the deportation of pregnant women and the mothers of citizen children, the ICE killings of the wrong men, the 350,000 Haitians held in engineered limbo. Force-feeding is that same disposition applied to the body directly: people rendered so powerless that the state feels free to reach past their consent entirely, hold them down, and do to them what medical ethics forbids and international law calls torture — and then file the paperwork, get the order, and insist it is care.

The people in those Texas cells had refused food to be heard. The government made sure that even that — even the refusal to eat — would not be theirs to decide.