The U.S. Justice authorized 19 cases of forced feeding of immigrants who initiated hunger strikes in protest against detention by the Immigration and Customs Service (ICE).
© Nick Oxford for The Washington Post via Getty Images
06/09/2026
by
Lusa
The most recent case involves a Cuban citizen detained at the ICE Processing Center in Montgomery, Texas, a facility run by the private company GEO Group.
According to an investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, a court has authorized non-consensual intervention to facilitate their forced feeding directly into the stomach.
In the 19 cases detected since January 2025, the ICE requested judicial authorisation for an “involuntary medical procedure” for forced feeding, a practice denounced as maltreatment and torture by human rights organizations.
“ The cruelty of the ICE in repressing legitimate protests reaches the point of opening the body of a protester to insert a tube into his stomach. This is just an example of the horrors that take place far from our eyes in ICE detention centers,” said Savannah Kumar, a U.S. Civil Liberties lawyer (ACLU).
The Guardian newspaper had access to a court order from federal judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas, stating that a nasogastric tube was inserted into the detention in August for forced feeding.
The ICE would now have obtained an extension of this order and authorization for surgery, known as “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy”.
Homeland Security, which oversees the ICE, reported on Thursday that the man “is eating again” and is no longer being fed by force, although he did not mention the surgery or re-feed after the judicial authorization for the operation, which apparently has not yet been performed.
The Cuban prisoner's name was not released because attempts to contact him were unsuccessful, the British newspaper explains. He was arrested on 22 July and began a hunger strike three days later. He was in the country since 1980 and had his deportation ordered in 2004.