An internal filing from ICE's Health Service Corps documents that a detainee who stopped eating was subjected to involuntary medical treatment, described in the paperwork as force feeding, hydration, forced urinary catheterization, or involuntary blood draws, after refusing meals. Latin Times reported it as the first documented force-feeding under this administration.
Force-feeding a hunger striker is coercive by design: a person's refusal of food, one of the few forms of protest available inside a locked facility, is overridden by inserting a tube. Medical ethics bodies, including the World Medical Association, have long held that competent detainees who refuse food should not be force-fed. The practice drew a Justice Department inquiry and congressional oversight demands when ICE did it during the first Trump term.
The policy was foreshadowed at the top. Border czar Tom Homan said earlier that detainees on hunger strike would be force-fed “if it gets bad enough.” The document confirms the stated policy has become practice, and does so out of ICE's own records rather than an outside allegation.