Homeland Security officials under Trump tried to force at least 10 hunger strikers in US immigration detention into medical procedures that included force-feeding, forced hydration, blood draws and urine collection. In several cases, the procedures were carried out or came so close that five people abandoned their hunger strike at the last minute.
The reporting lands now because it is built on court records from 2025 and 2026, not on speculation. It shows at least three detainees were definitely subjected to involuntary medical treatment, two more were probably subjected to it, and DHS sought court permission for guards to physically restrain the hunger strikers in every case reviewed. The pattern spans Port Isabel service processing center, Krome service processing center, Northwest ICE processing center and Montgomery processing center, with the forced practices apparently beginning three days before Trump's 2025 inauguration for a second term and continuing afterward.
One of the clearest examples is a Kurdish asylum seeker at Port Isabel, who was force-fed for nearly eight months starting in May 2025 and continuing until he was deported. Another detainee at the same facility faced involuntary medical procedures for nearly six months between September 2025 and March 2026. A separate hunger striker at Krome was subjected to forced medical procedures for nearly three months in a case in the southern district of Florida, while two others at Northwest ICE and Montgomery were probably subjected to the same treatment. In at least five cases in Texas, Arizona and Florida, detainees ended their hunger strike just before the procedures were to begin.
The conflict sits in a larger detention system that has kept more people behind bars under ICE, where hunger strikes have become a way to protest conditions and press for answers in legal cases. Human rights groups widely regard force-feeding as torture, which makes the government’s apparent reliance on these methods more than a medical dispute. It is also the part of the story that has not been publicly acknowledged: court records and reporting point to forced procedures, but the practice has not been openly addressed by DHS.
What remains unknown is how many detainees were ultimately subjected to the procedures across all ICE facilities in 2025 and 2026. The cases now documented show a pattern, not an isolated episode, and they suggest the next question is not whether the practice happened, but how far it reached.
