ICE wants to keep hunger strikes secret
When President Trump arrives in El Paso today, there’s a good chance his presidential limo will drive past the El Paso Service Processing Center — an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility located near the airport.
Within its walls, nine men from Punjab, India, have endured more than 40 days on a hunger strike.
Those men are seeking asylum in the United States and refuse food and drink until they are given a bond hearing and allowed to pursue their legal claims. Rather than being granted this fundamental and humane request, the nine hunger strikers are being force-fed through nasogastric tubes and given liquids through IVs in their arms.
Consistent with damning observations of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report from 2015 on immigrant detention, these men are being subjected to “conduct akin to torture.” They should be released immediately.
In the last two weeks, volunteers and concerned supporters have visited with the group. The men conveyed to us their poor treatment in the detention facility and the unjust handling of their cases by area immigration judges.
The IVs they are administered daily leave abundant needle marks and bruising on their arms. We directly observed that the feeding tubes attached to their noses appear larger than typical feeding tubes, and the men described them as hard and painful. They bleed profusely from their noses during feedings. They allege that inexperienced medical staff improperly performs the feedings, and they are denied pillows to elevate their heads during feeding sessions.
Several men indicated that medical staff shoves the tubes forcefully down into their bodies, and tugs on the tubes while they are being fed, causing additional pain. Some of the men are vomiting several times each day. They can barely walk, but rather than being taken by wheelchair to force-feeding, guards haul them by the shoulders, their feet dragging behind.
All of them, despite putting their health in severe jeopardy, are willing to risk death so that they can call attention to their unjust imprisonment and the abusive treatment to which they are subjected. Fearing persecution upon return to their home country, they are prepared to die in order to seek a fair hearing.
The treatment of these Punjabi men is not an anomaly. Cubans in the facility, and now a Nicaraguan, are on hunger strike. Detainees at facilities in Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco are on hunger strike as well.
This isn’t even the first hunger strike for the men in the El Paso facility. Some told us that they protested their conditions at the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico last year and were put in solitary confinement and transferred to their current location.
ICE wants to keep hunger strikes a secret and hide the abysmal, inhumane and torturous conditions in their facilities across this country.
The United States should only detain asylum seekers as a last resort. Fleeing persecution and civil turmoil, many are already traumatized enough. Yet the Trump administration has sought to lock up asylum seekers by default, even when they have sponsors, pose no threat and are not flight risks. They’re held indefinitely and the psychological trauma is exacerbated by poor conditions and substandard, inhumane treatment in facilities like the one in El Paso.
It doesn’t have to be like this. ICE has the discretion to release these individuals. Those on hunger strike could be released to their support networks here in the U.S for the sake of their health and well-being. They need proper medical attention and an opportunity to justly pursue their asylum claims.
An immediate, unannounced inspection of the El Paso facility by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General would be appropriate given the repeated allegations of mistreatment. Independent monitors must also be allowed access to the facility. It is well past time that the public demand ICE be held accountable.
The United States has had years to reform our detention practices. Unjustly imprisoning migrants and asylum seekers inflicts tremendous human and economic cost upon our country — and a grave moral cost upon our national soul. It is time to use community-based alternatives to detention and finally abolish these immigrant lockups from the United States.