How ICE Used Secret Court Orders to Force-Feed Hunger Strikers in Detention

A Guardian investigation has found that the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration has quietly attempted to force-feed at least ten hunger strikers in ICE detention since 2025 — no press conference, no policy memo, no public acknowledgment. At least three were definitively subjected to the procedures, which human rights groups classify as torture. Two more were likely subjected to them. Five others broke their strikes only at the last minute, after federal court orders had already been secured to restrain and tube them.

The machinery of medicalized cruelty

The apparatus is bureaucratic, which is precisely the point. DHS officials requested court orders authorizing detention guards to physically restrain hunger strikers inside privately run facilities, then executed those orders through contracted medical staff. The procedures — force-feeding via tubes threaded through the nose and down into the stomach, intravenous forced hydration, involuntary blood draws, urine collection — are not emergency interventions. They are systematic responses to political protest, applied to people whose only leverage against indefinite detention is their own bodies.

The cases span Port Isabel in south Texas, Krome in Miami, Northwest ICE in Washington state, and Montgomery outside Houston. One Kurdish asylum seeker was force-fed for nearly eight months before his deportation ended the procedure. Another at the same facility endured it for nearly six months. A third at Krome was subjected to forced medical procedures for nearly three months. In six cases, the detained immigrants had no legal representation during the proceedings that authorized these procedures against their bodies.

The architecture of disappearance

Read the timeline carefully. DHS apparently began requesting these court orders three days before Trump's second inauguration. The practice is not new — the Guardian found similar attempts under Biden's DHS in 2024, when the agency definitely proceeded against at least two people and likely subjected four more. But the scale of the current operation is inseparable from the administration's dramatic expansion of immigration arrests and detention. More people detained indefinitely means more hunger strikes. More hunger strikes means more court orders. More court orders means more contracted medical staff inserting tubes down the throats of people the state has decided to make invisible.

This is what extraction looks like when applied to human bodies: not resource depletion, but the systematic removal of autonomy, voice, and the basic ability to refuse. The privately operated facilities — Port Isabel, Krome, Montgomery — are profit centers for the corporations that run them. Their incentive structure rewards longer detention, not resolution. The court orders are not oversight; they are legal cover for a system that has been given permission to treat people as inventory.

What the silence authorizes

The government has not publicly acknowledged this practice. The silence is itself a form of policy. It tells us the administration considers force-feeding a routine matter of detention management, not a human rights question.

Watch the follow-up reporting. The Guardian has signaled two more installments in this series. Watch the named facilities — Port Isabel, Krome, Northwest, Montgomery — and the contractors who operate them. Watch the federal court dockets in the southern district of Texas, the southern district of Florida, the district of Arizona, and the western district of Washington, where these orders are being filed. And watch the immigration bar: legal aid organizations representing detained immigrants are the only structural check on a system that has been given permission to treat people as inventory.

We do not need to debate whether force-feeding hunger strikers is cruel. The medical community has long classified it as such. The question is whether we are willing to accept a state apparatus that uses court orders to formalize the cruelty, and private contractors to profit from its continuation.