Speaking with The Guardian, Kurdish asylum seeker Gabar Choli detailed Monday the torture he says he endured while held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas, the latest account of brutal conditions migrants face amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Choli, 40, began a hunger strike in March 2025 to protest the conditions at the facility, and a new investigation from The Guardian revealed that he was “quietly and intermittently force-fed by ICE for nearly eight months” until he was deported in January.
“Two guards would hold my feet; two hold my hands; one hold my head – and they would shove tubes in my nose,” Choli said, detailing his time at the ICE detention center publicly for the first time. “It just broke me, mentally broke me. They would take me to [a] solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood and drink the blood from inside [my throat].”
Force-feeding is widely condemned by human rights organizations as a form of torture, including by the American Civil Liberties Union. Nevertheless, The Guardian’s investigation found that the Trump administration had “used court orders” to subject at least 10 ICE detainees staging hunger strikes to “involuntary medical procedures, including force-feeding.”
Beyond the immediate physical and psychological harm caused by force-feeding, the involuntary medical procedure could cause long-term harm, according to Channelle Diaz, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University.
“This likely amounts to torture,” Diaz told The Guardian. “I would say that it’s even difficult to capture the degree of risk that he was being put at, long-term.”
Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has dramatically expanded immigration enforcement, ramping up ICE arrests and detentions nationwide as part of a promised mass deportation campaign.
The crackdown has been accompanied by mounting allegations of abuse inside detention facilities, including overcrowding, inadequate medical care and, as Choli’s case illustrates, the use of coercive procedures against detainees protesting their treatment.
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