The administration of US President Donald Trump faced human rights criticism after it was revealed that hunger-striking migrant detainees were subjected to coercive medical procedures, including forced feeding, which experts and human rights organizations describe as a violation of medical ethics and may amount to torture.
The Guardian, in an investigation published on Monday, revealed that court records showed that employees of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attempted to subject at least 10 hunger-striking detainees to these procedures, noting that at least three of them, and possibly five, were subjected to force-feeding, while others ended their strike to avoid having a plastic tube inserted through the nose into the stomach to force-feed them.
Hundreds of detainees in ICE centers are on hunger strikes to protest what they say are poor detention conditions, including overcrowding, poor hygiene, poor quality food, lack of medical care, and delays in immigration procedures.
The newspaper reported that one Kurdish asylum seeker detained at the Port Isabel, Texas, detention center was force-fed for eight months, while another detainee was subjected to the same procedure for six months. It noted that some of those force-fed did not have legal representation.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security defends the detention conditions, asserting that detainees receive food and necessary care, and denies the existence of abuses.
Homeland Security Secretary Marquan Mullen said in May that the hunger strikers represented a “small group” of detainees, claiming they were protesting because they wanted their “ethnic food,” adding: “They can go back to their countries and get the food they want. This isn’t a Holiday Inn.”
Subjecting immigration detainees to forced feeding requires judicial approval, but migrant rights lawyer Eunice Cho said legal proceedings in these cases are limited, and judges' orders are often issued quickly before detainees can challenge them.
The World Medical Association, United Nations agencies and human rights defenders consider the forced feeding of hunger strikers to be an ethically unacceptable practice.
Matthew Winnia, a medical ethics expert at the University of Colorado, said that forcing someone to receive treatment against their will is “unethical,” explaining that hunger strikers are not seeking death, but are using the strike as a means of protesting their detention conditions.
This comes amid broader criticism of the record of US migrant detention centers, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement data indicates that more than 50 people died in custody during President Trump's second term, including suicides and deaths that experts say could have been avoided due to staffing shortages and inadequate care policies.
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