The United States is force-feeding nineteen men it refuses to release. Since January of last year, ICE has quietly obtained federal court orders for “involuntary medical procedures” on nineteen hunger strikers — the government’s own name for what happens when a man in its custody stops eating and the state decides it would rather hold him down and feed him than sign the order that would let him walk out. That is not medicine. That is the state holding a man’s body hostage to its own docket.
The framing that has travelled furthest is the one that says this is proof of a working system. The record says otherwise. Seventy-three men are refusing food in a Georgia prison. They are asylum seekers — Russian, Chinese, Sudanese, Afghan, Nepali, Yemeni — held between sixteen months and nearly three years by the United States government without ever being charged with a crime. The Folkston D. Ray James ICE Processing Center is a former state prison in southeast Georgia, privatized, expanded, and operated by GEO Group under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, by a private-prison industry that profits from keeping cells full. As of July, roughly two thousand two hundred people were detained there. The seventy-three are about three percent of them.
They have signed an open letter. They have released a video. They have told the government what their days contain. That is not a tantrum. It is a verdict.
Here is what the document says. The legal norm in this country — long-standing, bipartisan, codified — is that people awaiting civil immigration proceedings are released unless the government makes an individualized showing that they are dangerous or a flight risk. Forty-five of the men published their alien numbers, signed their names, and put in writing that no such finding has been made in their cases. They have been held between sixteen months and nearly three years. They have not been adjudicated dangerous. They have not been adjudicated flight risks. The Department of Homeland Security has not answered the question of why they are still there. GEO Group referred questions to ICE. ICE did not respond. DHS did not respond. The silence is the message.
They describe what their days contain. Moldy food. Leaky ceilings. Plumbing failures. Guards who threaten them with solitary confinement. Substandard medical attention. An unnamed medical staffer told one Russian signatory that he had “no obligation to treat” him beyond keeping him alive — a phrasing the reporting captured elsewhere as his only obligation being that the man not “drop dead.” Alexei Kovalko and Alexander Borovkov, two of the Russian signers, drafted a separate complaint describing “xenophobic” employees and “foul-smelling water.” GEO Group, ICE, and DHS declined to comment on the allegations. Read the names. Then read the conditions.
Idris Makhmudov, a Russian asylum seeker who helped organize the strike, has been moved to isolation. Monica Whatley of the Campaign to Shut Down the Folkston ICE Processing Center called it retaliation. Call it a routine administrative response if you like. A man coordinated a nonviolent action among the men held beside him, and the government took him out of the room. Liang Sonji requested asylum in October 2023 and has been detained since. One of the men on strike is a Yemeni asylum seeker suffering from lung cancer who has a U.S.-citizen child. Twenty-two people have now died in ICE custody this year. The same machinery has been running at the GEO-run Delaney Hall facility in New Jersey, where a parallel refusal met a parallel administrative response — and while all of this has been happening, thousands of people have taken to American streets this summer to say so, some of them met with force. This is the pattern these pages have been documenting for months: U.S. citizens detained by mistake, immigrants dying in custody, nonviolent protest answered with the disciplinary box.
The machine that holds these men is older than any one president. It has roots reaching back to the late nineteenth century, and every administration of both parties has honored some of the principles the U.S. bishops set down with the Mexican bishops in Strangers No Longer in 2003 and violated others — my own community among them, for the record is not a thing I am exempt from. What is happening at Folkston is not a departure from the American immigration system. It is that system with the volume turned up and the individualized review turned off. And no, I am not claiming that these men have been adjudicated anything. They have not — that is the point.
The Torah does not leave this to the imagination. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” “He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.” The commandment to love the stranger appears in Torah more often than any other commandment, because the memory of having been the stranger is the precondition of welcoming one. And the rabbi the prophets lead to said the same thing in the register of judgment: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Then, in the same breath: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The men at Folkston are the strangers. They have told us so in their own names, with their alien numbers attached.
Pope Francis flew to Lampedusa in 2013 and named the condition this country is now in. “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference,” he said. “We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” He named the culture that makes it possible — a well-being that “makes us insensitive to the cries of others.” That is the culture that can hold a man with lung cancer in a cell for years and call the hunger strike that follows an administrative matter. And Francis named the church’s own failure in the same homily: “the hypocritical attitude of the priest and of the servant of the altar.” Any of us who claims this tradition and reads past that sentence has chosen comfort over the reading. When an entire order is arranged so that men can be held this way, that is pecado social — social sin — and the obligation to name it does not pause because the arithmetic is comfortable.
To the official who signed the order: the door is open. You can stop. To the contractor whose contract fills by the bed: you can refuse the work. To the legislator who calls this enforcement: you can demand the individualized showing the law already requires — it costs you nothing but the appearance of toughness. And to the reader who has decided that these men are somebody else’s problem: they are not. They are strangers, and we were strangers, and the debt does not expire because it is inconvenient. A humane immigration policy does not require open borders and does not require anyone to pretend sovereignty is a fiction. It requires what the law already says: an individualized showing before a person is held, a hearing in a reasonable time, an end to detention contracts that pay by the bed, and the release of a sick man to the child who is an American citizen. Those are not radical demands. They are the minimum that a country which claims to be governed by law owes the people it is holding.
Óscar Romero stood in his cathedral in San Salvador on the twenty-third of March, 1980, and said what had to be said to the men doing the killing: En nombre de Dios, en nombre de este sufrido pueblo, les ruego, les ordeno: ¡cese la represión! In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, I beseech you, I order you: stop the repression. The door was open then. It is open now. What is owed at Folkston is smaller than that and easier than that. Not the end of an army. The end of a docket that has decided these men are too expensive to release and too useful to free. That decision is cruel, and it is not complicated.
Somewhere in southeast Georgia tonight a tray will be carried into a cell and carried out untouched. That is the whole protest. A man has decided that the thing he is owed is worth more than the thing he is being given, and the most powerful government on earth does not know what to do with that except to hold him down and feed him. Forty-five men put their names to paper while three agencies declined to comment. The letter is already in the record. The only thing left to decide is what the rest of us do with it.