The Trump administration has found a way to turn political protest into a medical problem, then answer it with custody, restraints, tubes, catheters, and needles.
The Guardian’s July 28 report makes that plain through an ICE Health Service Corps document that disclosed forced treatment of a hunger striker in immigration detention. The Guardian reported that an unnamed detained person who began a hunger strike between October and December 2025 was subjected to forced feeding, hydration, forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws.
DHS did not answer the Guardian’s questions about what forced treatment was used. It replied that detainees get three meals a day. The same ICE document said at least seven detained people were on hunger strike in February 2026, and it forecast $4,504.75 for external medical care for hunger strike patients plus $168,928.01 for fiscal year 2026 hunger strike costs.
That answer is grotesque. Nobody needed confirmation that ICE owns trays. The question is what it does when people locked inside its system refuse those trays because the refusal is the only protest left to them.
Hunger strikes are alarms
Hunger strikes do not come from nowhere. The World Medical Association says they usually arise in detention settings because people lack other ways to make their demands known. That is the sentence ICE wants everyone to skip. Refusing food under lock and key is an alarm.
This summer, that alarm has been sounding across immigration detention. The Guardian reported that at least 300 detainees began a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in New Jersey from May to June. AP reported in May that Democratic members of Congress visited Delaney Hall after accounts of dire conditions and a reported hunger strike.
In California, the Immigrant Defenders Law Center said at least 20 people detained at Adelanto’s Desert View Annex launched a hunger strike on May 19, 2026, over unsafe conditions, medical neglect, inadequate food and water, retaliation, and prolonged detention. ImmDef said a petition signed by 150 detained people was given to Reps. Judy Chu, Pete Aguilar, and Jimmy Gomez during a June 1 visit. The next day, according to accounts shared with ImmDef, people participating in the strike were zip tied, threatened with tear gas and transfers, and in at least two cases placed in solitary confinement.
ICE and DHS deny plenty of this. They deny hunger strikes. They deny retaliation. They deny bad conditions. That is why the ICE Health Service Corps document matters. The government’s own medical arm is accounting for the protests officials keep trying to minimize.
The procedure is the violence
Forced treatment sounds clinical because bureaucracies know how to hide harm inside bland nouns. The ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights reviewed more than 10,000 pages of ICE documents for a 2021 investigation of hunger strikes from 2013 to 2020. They found hunger strikes by at least 1,378 people from 74 countries across 62 immigration detention centers in 24 states from 2013 to 2017.
Their report described forced feeding, forced hydration, forced urinary catheterization, involuntary blood draws, solitary confinement, retaliatory transfers, and excessive force. It also explains what the words mean. Forced feeding can mean pushing a tube through the nose, down the throat, and into the stomach. Forced hydration can mean needles and lines inserted into veins. Forced urinary catheterization means inserting a tube into the urethra, with risks of pain, bleeding, infection, and injury.
When ICE chooses control over the complaint, the body becomes the place where authority gets reasserted.
We already know what this looks like outside the language of reports. In 2019, AP reported that ICE confirmed nine men were being forced fed under court order at an El Paso detention center. One man told AP he was dragged from his cell three times a day, strapped down, and fed through tubes pushed through his nose. The Texas Tribune later republished The Intercept’s 2022 account of Ajay Kumar, an Indian asylum seeker who was forced fed at the El Paso Service Processing Center after 37 days without food during a 2019 hunger strike.
Kumar was in civil immigration detention, not serving a criminal sentence. That distinction matters. Immigration detention is already a massive act of state coercion against people whose cases may still be pending. When the government then uses medical force against a protest inside that detention, it is layering coercion on coercion and calling the top layer care.
Medical ethics has already drawn the line
The ethical line here is not obscure. The World Medical Association says hunger strikers should not be forced to receive treatment they refuse, and that forced feeding is never ethically acceptable when used against a mentally competent person who has made an informed refusal. It also says restraint, handcuffing, isolation, tying a hunger striker to a bed, or similar pressure because of the strike is unacceptable.
Physicians for Human Rights said in 2019 that forced feeding immigrants in detention violates medical ethics because it disregards the informed decisions of people protesting detention conditions and ignores the issues that led them to refuse food. PHR said the practice can amount to torture in some cases.
That is why the “medical treatment” label is so slippery. Real care starts with trust, consent, independent judgment, and attention to the patient’s actual conditions. ICE detention supplies the opposite context: confinement, fear, dependency, and officials with every incentive to end the visible protest before it spreads.
There is no moral magic in a stethoscope if the state is using the clinician to enforce custody.
The duty to preserve life is not a blank check
The strongest argument for ICE is simple: once the government detains someone, it has a duty to keep that person alive. Hunger strikes can lead to death or permanent damage. ICE can say it seeks court orders, monitors health, and acts to prevent tragedy.
That argument deserves an answer because custody does create responsibility. The government cannot lock people up and then shrug when they deteriorate.
But the duty to preserve life does not erase bodily autonomy. It does not make every invasive act ethical. It does not let ICE define the problem as “this person will not eat” while ignoring the conditions that made refusing food feel like the last available language.
If the government wants to preserve life, it can start by reducing detention, using community based alternatives, ensuring lawyers and independent medical care, ending retaliation, and fixing the conditions people are risking their bodies to expose. It can answer the alarm instead of breaking the person ringing it.
The Senate Appropriations Committee saw enough danger in this practice that it directed ICE to publish quarterly data on hunger strikes, including people subjected to forced feeding, hydration, forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws. That oversight requirement exists because forced medical treatment in detention is a civil liberties emergency.
Trump’s detention system wants the public to see meals on a tray and stop looking. Keep looking at the locked room, the refused food, the tube, the catheter, the court order, the government doctor, and the agency that hears a desperate protest and reaches for force.
ICE found another way to overpower immigrants, then tried to pass it off as healthcare.