Trump’s ICE is strapping hunger strikers down and shoving tubes down their throats.
Gabar Choli is forty years old. He is a Kurdish filmmaker, an activist for an independent Kurdistan, and an asylum seeker who crossed the border seeking protection from return to Iran. That protection is not a favor. It is the law’s own remedy for a person who fears persecution.
He kept his ICE check-ins. He reported month after month. He qualified for a work permit. Then, on February 25, 2025, he went to a routine check-in and was arrested. That is how the mass-deportation crackdown takes a man: through the machinery of compliance itself.
In a privately run immigration jail, officials pressured him to sign his own deportation order to Iran. He refused. He asked for humane treatment and a fair resolution of his case. When neither came, he stopped eating. He wrote to the federal judge so there would be no mistake.
“I am not suicidal. I am using hunger strike as the only available option to protest the abuse and mistreatment.”
Now watch what the state did, because this is the whole story.
A doctor examined Choli and found him “operating under his own free will.” He was of sound mind. He was choosing. He possessed the one thing a captive still has the power to possess: his own body.
The World Health Organization and other medical organizations recognize a competent person’s right to refuse food. Patient autonomy is one of medicine’s core principles. A hunger strike by a man who is not suicidal is a protest, not a medical emergency.
So ICE went to Judge Rolando Olvera and asked to feed Choli by force. The judge signed the order without hearing from Choli. The next day, the guards came.
Two held his feet. Two held his hands. One held his head.
They pinned him to a bed and pushed a tube up his nose and down his throat. Sixty centimeters of it. You feel every centimeter. They pumped liquid nutrition into a stomach that had not asked for it.
They did this twice a day for nearly eight months. A physician at Columbia who reviewed the case placed the number of tube placements at more than one hundred, possibly more than two hundred. A nurse pushed the tube so hard that it tore Choli’s nose from the inside. His nose bled for days. The tube damaged his esophagus, his sinuses, and his stomach. One insertion went into his lung. He choked and passed out. A guard’s rough handling injured his ribs, and breathing hurt for weeks.
After the sessions, they locked him in a solitary cell that never went dark. He lay there choking on his own blood. He had diarrhea and was left to soil himself in a cell without a toilet. He wept because the state had reduced him to an object.
“It just broke me,” he said. “Mentally broke me.”
His one negotiated relief was prayer. On Fridays, they let him worship with the other men. He called them his peace days.
Dr. Chanelle Diaz, who reviewed the case, said what any person reading it should be able to say: “That is just not medical care, that is torture.”
And I will say it plainly. Those hands were not treating a patient. They were breaking a man, and they called it saving him.
Do not let the state’s own words slip past. It argued that Choli’s hunger strike posed “a serious threat to the security and good order” of the facility. It said “the public interest is served by not allowing attempts to manipulate the immigration system.”
Read that again.
A man starving himself so he will be treated as a person becomes a threat to good order. A man refusing to surrender his body becomes a manipulator of the immigration system. The public interest becomes the breaking of his will.
They were not preserving his life. They were preserving the rule that a man in ICE custody has no body of his own.
That is why the state denied him a lawyer. Judge Olvera wrote that lawyers are not guaranteed in civil proceedings. He also wrote that even if Choli had a lawyer, it would make no difference, because the feeding orders would be granted anyway.
Judge, you told a man with no lawyer that a lawyer could not help him. That is the voice of a court that has already decided, which is the one thing a court must never be.
No plainer statement of the crime exists. A man has been converted into a body owned by the state, fed or starved at the state’s pleasure.
Isaiah says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” The state did it in the quiet of a medical room. It called conquest care. It called coercion treatment. It called a starving man’s refusal to surrender himself a threat to order.
The tube was not medicine. It was a control instrument, and “care” was its name.
The powerless have always understood what the body is worth. Gandhi called the fast satyagraha—truth-force—and offered his own body as testimony. The suffragettes starved in their cells. The hunger strikers of the Northern Irish blocks starved and died. They understood what every prisoner understands: the body is the last thing the jailer can try to own.
The state that force-feeds is the state that cannot answer testimony except with violence against the flesh. The tube is the confession that the man could not be moved, so his body would be moved for him. After a man has starved for weeks, forced feeding is not care. It is conquest with a nasal catheter.
The Christ I was raised on said, “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me; I was in prison and you did not visit me.” The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
The appetite to make the stranger bear the state’s violence is not new. It builds every wall and every cage. It has a name: the state’s hand on a body it has decided is expendable.
And we built the machine that does this.
The man in the White House and the judge who signed the order are accountable, and they are named. But the machine is older. The 1996 immigration laws expanded detention, deportation, and the criminal grounds for removal. Private companies are paid to hold human beings. Civil detention means a person may be confined while no lawyer is guaranteed. The system has spent decades turning people into case numbers and beds.
It is the same apparatus a Wisconsin mosque president has described in the language of occupied prisoners. It is the same state that holds people and decides in secret what may be done to their flesh.
We did not all sign the orders. But the climate that makes a judge sign them was built by all of us who let the stranger become a number and the number become a bed. I live in that we. I am not outside it.
I will not make this one party’s sin, because Choli himself refused that consolation.
“Trump is just one person,” he said. “Trump is not here torturing me.”
He was right. Trump did not personally hold Choli’s head against the bed. The machine did. The machine is the point.
DHS sources later told The Guardian that ICE received court orders for involuntary treatment involving eighteen hunger strikers between January 2025 and August 4, 2026. Eighteen people. The filings did not speak first of their health. They spoke of order. They spoke of stopping protest from spreading.
Immigration detention is civil, not criminal. Release was available in Choli’s case. Release should have been the answer the moment a competent man said he would not eat until he was treated humanely.
A man of sound mind who will not eat is a man to be accompanied, not fed by force. A civil detainee is not a medical necessity. A country that believes the stranger is sacred does not break the stranger’s body to teach him not to ask.
The government repeatedly chose court-authorized involuntary treatment over release in Choli’s case, even though release was available. That release was the right answer in March, in May, and in every one of the eight months that followed.
Óscar Romero once cried to soldiers, “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people … I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”
- Cese la represión.*
Judge Olvera, nurse, guard, signer—even you. Stop the repression. The door is open. A man in your power who will not eat because you treat him inhumanely is not a threat to good order. He is a question about whether you will release him.
You can stop. It was then. It is now. It is never too late to open the cells and feed no one by force again.
They deported Choli to Canada in January. The next day he ate his first solid meal in months: a small salad. His jaw hurt for days. He had to learn how to eat again, as if he were a child. He says the price was his kidneys, his gallbladder, his intestines, and his bladder. He is still learning.
The court mailed the notice closing his case to the jail that had held him. The notice came back:
Return to sender. Not here.
The machine that fed him for eight months could not find him to close his file.
The tube is not a judgment. The release is. Receive the stranger. Stop the repression. Let the men go.