LOS FRESNOS, Texas — Two guards held his feet. Two held his hands. A fifth held his head. Then, Gabar Choli said, they shoved a nasogastric tube into his nose. “It just broke me, mentally broke me,” Choli, a Kurdish filmmaker and United Nations-recognized refugee, said of the procedure he endured repeatedly at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in south Texas. “They would take me to a solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood.” Choli, 40, was one of at least ten immigration detainees targeted by the Trump administration for involuntary medical procedures after they refused food to protest their confinement, according to a Guardian investigation published Monday. Federal prosecutors and ICE officials obtained court orders to force-feed the detainees in emergency proceedings that, in several cases, lasted less than twenty-four hours and gave the detainees no opportunity to speak, no lawyer, and no warning before the judge ruled. Between January 2025 and August 2026, ICE obtained court orders authorizing the forced medical treatment of 18 hunger strikers in at least four federal districts, the investigation found. At least three detainees were definitively force-fed; five others broke their hunger strikes at the last moment to avoid the procedures. ICE allocated $168,928 in its fiscal year 2026 budget for hunger-strike-related equipment and medical supplies. Choli’s case began in February 2025, when ICE detained him at the Desert View Annex facility in Adelanto, California. He said he feared deportation to Iran, the country whose threats he had fled and whose government, he believed, would imprison or kill him for his Kurdish activism and film work. He had lived in Vancouver with UN refugee status and had made nine short films addressing discrimination and repression. He began a hunger strike on March 24, 2025, to protest what he described as a threat of removal to Iran and conditions in the detention facility. After roughly two weeks, ICE transferred him to Port Isabel in Los Fresnos, south Texas, one of the largest immigration processing centers in the country and, the Guardian found, a central site for the administration’s force-feeding operations. He was placed in medical isolation.
On May 24, 2025, Federal Judge Rolando Olvera of the Southern District of Texas granted ICE and federal prosecutors’ second request for authorization to conduct forced medical procedures, including nasogastric tube feeding. Choli did not have a lawyer. A public defender request was denied, the court holding that the civil case did not carry a right to counsel. Olvera ruled without hearing from Choli at all. “There is very little due process in these proceedings,” said Eunice Cho, a senior lawyer at the ACLU National Prison Project, who reviewed the case. “These orders are essentially a rubber stamp.” Cho called the process a “stark example of the brutality” the administration had unleashed against immigrants and said the hidden nature of the proceedings “simply creates more opportunities for abuse and coercion.” Medical professionals who reviewed the circumstances were more direct. Dr. Channelle Diaz, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, said the procedures “likely amount to torture.” Dr. Matthew Wynia, a medical ethicist and director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, said the forced treatment was unethical by any standard. “People who are on hunger strike do not want to die, they are not suicidal,” Wynia said. “They are using the only tool available to them to protest the circumstances of their confinement.” The procedure was not painless or clean. Choli described guards inserting the tube so forcefully it tore his nasal tissue. Medical staff, he said, also withheld water, fresh air, and bathroom access as coercive tools before the feedings. By November 2025, after 296 days on hunger strike, DHS sought to expand the court order to include a gastrostomy, a feeding tube surgically implanted through the abdominal wall. The Trump administration’s public posture on the practice has been dismissive. In May 2026, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested that hunger-striking detainees were demanding “their ethnic right food” and told reporters they were free to return to their home countries if dissatisfied. “This isn’t Holiday Inn,” he said. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was present at the remarks and smiled approvingly, according to witnesses. ICE did not respond to the Guardian’s questions for the investigation. DHS’s stated position is that it “respects a person’s right to refuse treatment when appropriate” but may seek court authorization for medical intervention when it determines there is medical necessity. The broader pattern extended across multiple facilities and judicial districts. Detainees at the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami, at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Washington state, and at the Montgomery Processing Center in Houston were also subjected to forced procedures. Six of the reviewed cases involved detainees with no legal representation during court proceedings. More than 50 people have died in ICE custody during Trump’s second term, including at least 10 by suicide. The ACLU’s challenges to Trump immigration executive orders have multiplied since the second term began, but the force-feeding proceedings represent a category of action the organization’s lawyers say is particularly difficult to contest. The emergency timeline, sometimes less than a day, gives lawyers no opportunity to intervene before a judge has already ruled. An immigration detention case in Buffalo was set for an August 12 hearing, a measure of process the detainee in Los Fresnos was never afforded. The DHS Secretary’s escalating demands on ICE suggest that pressure on detention facilities is unlikely to ease. Sarah Houston, a managing attorney at ImmDef, an immigrant defense organization, was direct about what the internal ICE document revealed. “No one goes on hunger strike unless they are really desperate,” she said. “This is a blatant admission of the practice.” Choli was deported in January 2026, ending nearly eight months of intermittent force-feedings. Whether he was removed to Iran, the country whose threats had driven him to begin his hunger strike nearly a year earlier, has not been publicly confirmed. He has not made a public statement since his deportation. His whereabouts remain unknown.
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