A little-noticed internal filing from ICE's Health Service Corps has done something no press release ever has: it puts in writing that a detainee who stopped eating was subjected to involuntary medical treatment under the current administration. Covering the opening quarter of fiscal year 2026 and first surfaced by the Guardian, the document describes one unnamed patient — who began refusing meals sometime between October and December — as having been "subject to force feeding, hydration, or forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws."
Elsewhere in the paperwork, ICE reports seven people were still on hunger strike as of mid-February, and the agency earmarks close to $169,000 in outside medical costs tied to strikers for the full fiscal year.
An Attorney Calls the Legal Process Hollow
Eunice Cho, a senior lawyer with the ACLU's National Prison Project who has tracked ICE's handling of hunger strikes for years, argues the judicial approval required before force-feeding offers little real protection. She described the court orders behind such procedures as amounting to a "rubber stamp" in practice, since so many detained immigrants go without a lawyer to contest them. Asked how often forced treatment has been used since that February count, Homeland Security declined to give a number, saying only that detainees are fed on a regular schedule.
Strikes Have Broken Out Across the Detention System
This confirmation lands in the middle of a year marked by unrest inside detention facilities nationwide. The biggest flashpoint came at New Jersey's Delaney Hall, where nearly 300 detainees walked off work assignments and refused meals from late May into June, citing rotten food and unmet medical needs — a protest that wound down, Prism Reports found, only after participants said they faced retaliation for speaking out.
Pennsylvania's Moshannon Valley Processing Center saw its own meal refusals that same spring, after a medical scare that one detainee's lawyers say led to his being placed in solitary and later transferred out of state. At California's Adelanto facility, attorneys with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center say strikers there were bound with zip ties, warned they'd face tear gas, or moved into isolation — even as officials denied that anyone at the facility was refusing food at all.
Border czar Tom Homan didn't shy away from the topic when a Fox News host pressed him in late May, vowing that ICE would seek a court order to force-feed strikers "if it gets bad enough." Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin struck a very different tone about the same standoff days later, telling reporters the handful of detainees skipping meals were only after their "ethnic right food" and were free to go home and find it.
A Separate Dataset Shows Rising Isolation and Deaths
The force-feeding revelation surfaced not long after ICE quietly posted a fuller batch of detention figures on July 20 — its first release in three months, following a blackout that had already drawn lawsuits over transparency. Digging through those numbers, the Daily Beast's own investigative arm, Punchup, calculated that the most medically fragile detainees on record — those flagged for serious illness, hunger strikes, or suicide watch — averaged 63 straight days in solitary confinement over the winter quarter, more than quadruple the length the United Nations treats as a warning sign for torture.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk had already sounded a related alarm weeks earlier. Extended isolation, he said, "could amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Separately, he suggested that conditions inside ICE custody cast doubt on whether the recent run of deaths there was avoidable.
The same delayed dataset put 75,755 people in ICE custody as of mid-January — about 7 percent above the agency's prior public figure and a new record. Separately, the Guardian's own year-end accounting counted 32 deaths in ICE custody across all of 2025, the highest annual toll the agency has recorded since the early 2000s; the United Nations puts that figure one higher, at 33. Halfway through 2026, the death count is already tracking ahead of last year's pace. Pressed on the numbers, a Homeland Security spokesperson maintained there had been "no spike in deaths" and pointed to standards it says exceed those of most state prisons.
Force-Feeding Predates This Administration by Over a Decade
None of this is entirely new territory for ICE. In 2019, the agency force-fed six detainees at its El Paso processing center. Court records examined jointly by the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights in 2021 pushed the documented origin of such orders back to at least 2012 — a practice used under both Republican and Democratic presidents, including one previously unreported case from 2016. Medical associations have long held that feeding someone against their will violates basic ethical standards, whatever legal paperwork backs it. What advocates say is genuinely new here isn't the practice itself, but that the government has finally put it on paper — quietly, tucked into the kind of budget document that rarely draws headlines.
