Kurdish asylum seeker Gabar Choli, 40, began a hunger strike in March 2025 to protest conditions at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas. He was quietly and intermittently force-fed by ICE for nearly eight months. He was deported in January. He is describing what happened to him publicly for the first time.
“Two guards would hold my feet; two hold my hands; one hold my head and they would shove tubes in my nose,” Choli told The Guardian in an investigation published Monday and confirmed by Raw Story. “It just broke me, mentally broke me. They would take me to solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood and drink the blood from inside my throat.” The Guardian’s investigation found that the Trump administration used court orders to subject at least 10 ICE detainees staging hunger strikes to what it describes as “involuntary medical procedures, including force-feeding.”
Force-feeding is widely condemned by human rights organizations as a form of torture. The American Civil Liberties Union has published reports on ICE’s use of the procedure against hunger-strikers and has characterized it as a form of abuse. Channelle Diaz, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, told The Guardian: “This likely amounts to torture. I would say that it’s even difficult to capture the degree of risk that he was being put at, long-term.” ICE has not publicly addressed the specific cases described in The Guardian’s investigation.
The Trump administration has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement since January 2025, ramping up ICE arrests and detentions as part of the promised mass deportation campaign. The crackdown has been accompanied by mounting allegations of abuse inside detention facilities, including overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and the use of coercive procedures against detainees protesting their conditions. Choli’s case is the latest and most detailed account to emerge. He was deported after eight months of intermittent force-feeding. He is no longer in the United States.
The procedure was done with court orders. A professor called it torture. ICE has not commented.
When the government force-feeds hunger-striking detainees with court orders and a Columbia professor says it likely amounts to torture, what exactly is the legal authorization covering?
Sources
Raw Story: Torture alleged as detainees claim Trump’s ICE deploying ‘involuntary medical procedures’
