ICE force feeding detainees on hunger strikes

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Cuddles, Jan 31, 2019.

  1. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    https://www.apnews.com/c4b201dac8bf48eba17485a5c357b810

    APNewsBreak: ICE force-feeding detainees on hunger strike

    Immigrants have gone on hunger strikes over the past month to protest conditions inside detention facilities, prompting officials to force-feed six of them through plastic nasal tubes at a Texas location, The Associated Press has learned.

    More detainees are refusing food at the El Paso Processing Center than at any other ICE facility, and lawyers say some detainees are losing weight rapidly after not eating or drinking for more than 30 days. Detainees, a relative and an attorney told the AP that nearly 30 men in the El Paso, Texas ICE detention center, mostly from India and Cuba, have been striking there to protest what they say is rampant verbal abuse and threats of deportation from guards. They are also upset about lengthy lock ups while awaiting legal proceedings.

    ICE confirmed Thursday there are 11 detainees in El Paso who are on hunger strikes — which means they have refused nine consecutive meals — and an additional four in the agency’s Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco areas of responsibility, according to agency spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa.

    In mid-January, two weeks after they stopped eating, a federal judge authorized force-feeding of some El Paso detainees, Zamarripa said. She did not address the detainees’ allegations of abuse but did say the El Paso Processing Center would closely monitor the food and water intake of detainees to protect their health and safety.

    The men with nasal tubes are having persistent nose bleeds, and are vomiting several times a day, said Amrit Singh, whose two nephews from the Indian state of Punjab have been on hunger strike for about a month.

    “They are not well. Their bodies are really weak, they can’t talk and they have been hospitalized, back and forth,” said Singh, from California. “They want to know why they are still in the jail and want to get their rights and wake up the government immigration system.”

    Singh’s nephews are both seeking asylum. Court records show they pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in September after illegally walking across the border near El Paso.

    Hunger strikes are uncommon and court orders authorizing force-feeding are exceedingly rare, said an ICE official. Although the agency doesn’t keep statistics on this, attorneys, advocates and ICE staffers AP spoke with did not recall a situation where it’s come to this.

    To force-feed someone, medical experts typically wind a tube tightly around their finger to make it bend easily, and put lubricant on the tip, before shoving it into a patient’s nose. The patient has to swallow sips of water while the tube is pushed down their throat. It can be very painful.

    The El Paso detention facility, located on a busy street near the airport, is highly guarded and surrounded by chain-link fence.

    Ruby Kaur, a Michigan-based attorney representing one of the hunger strikers, said her client had been force-fed and put on an IV after four weeks without eating or drinking water. Her client has lost about 50 pounds in the 31 days he has been on hunger strike, she said.

    According to ICE standards for treatment of hunger strikers, medical staff members weigh detainees and take their vital signs at least once a day.

    “They go on hunger strike, and they are put into solitary confinement and then the ICE officers kind of psychologically torture them, telling the asylum seekers they will send them back to Punjab,” Kaur said.

    Eiorjys Rodriguez Calderin, who on a call from the facility described himself as a Cuban dissident, said conditions in Cuba forced him and other detainees to seek safety in the U.S., and they risk persecution if they are deported.

    “They are restraining people and forcing them to get tubes put in their noses,” said Rodriguez, adding that he had passed his “credible fear” interview and sought to be released on parole. “They put people in solitary, as punishment.”

    Those “credible fear” interviews are conducted by immigration authorities as an initial screening for asylum requests.

    ICE classifies a detainee as a hunger striker after they refuse nine consecutive meals. Federal courts have not conclusively decided whether a judge must issue an order before ICE force-feeds an immigration detainee, so rules vary by district and type of court, and sometimes orders are filed secretly.

    In Tacoma, Washington, where immigration detainees have held high-profile hunger strikes in recent years, courts have ordered force-feeding at least six times, according to court records. In July 2017, a federal judge refused to allow ICE to restrain and force-feed a hunger striking Iraqi detainee who wanted to be housed with fellow Iraqi Chaldean Christians detained Arizona facility.

    Since May 2015, volunteers for the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants have documented 1,396 people on hunger strike in 18 immigration detention facilities.

    “By starving themselves, these men are trying to make public the very suffering that ICE is trying keep hidden from taxpayers,” said Christina Fialho, director of the group.

    While court orders allowing force-feeding have been issued in cases involving inmates, Fialho couldn’t recall a situation when involuntary feeding actually occurred in immigration detention facilities because the inmates opted to eat.

    The force-feeding of detainees through nasal tubes at Guantanamo Bay garnered international blowback. Hunger strikes began shortly after the military prison opened in 2002, with force-feeding starting in early 2006 following mass refusals to eat.

    After four weeks without eating, the body’s metabolic systems start to break down, and hunger strikers can risk permanent damage, including cognitive impairment, said Dr. Marc Stern, a correctional physician at the University of Washington in Seattle who has previously consulted with the Department of Homeland Security.

    “You can become demented and lose coordination, and some of it is reversible, some of it isn’t,” Stern said. “The dangers are not just metabolic. If you are very weak, you could very simply get up to do something and fall and crack your skull.”

    Force-feeding raises ethics issues for medical professionals who work inside ICE facilities.

    The American Medical Association has expressed its concerns about physicians participating in the force-feeding of hunger strikers on multiple occasions, and its own principles of medical ethics state “a patient who has decision-making capacity may accept or refuse any recommended medical intervention.”

    The association also endorses the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo, which states that when prisoners refuse food and physicians believe they are capable of “rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially.”
     
  2. Cuddles

    Cuddles

    https://www.azcentral.com/story/new...ry-medical-procedures-aclu-report/5338057001/
    Report: Hunger strikers in ICE custody were force-fed, subjected to other involuntary medical procedures

    Immigration detainees in ICE custody were force-fed in retaliation for going on hunger strikes to protest conditions inside U.S. immigration detention facilities, according to a new report.

    Hunger strikers were subjected to forced hydration, forced urinary catheterization and other involuntary and invasive medical procedures, placed in solitary confinement and experienced retaliatory deportations and transfers, according to the report by the American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights.

    "Given the fact that hunger strikes are a First Amendment protected activity — this speech is protected by the Constitution — and to see the level of retaliation and truly brutal medical procedures that are being used against people against their will is truly shocking," said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's National Prison Project and co-author of the report.

    An ICE official disputed the report's findings.

    “ICE does not retaliate in any way against hunger strikers," Yasmeen Pitts O'Keefe, an ICE spokesperson in Phoenix, said in a written statement.

    "For their health and safety, ICE carefully monitors the food and water intake of those detainees identified as being on a hunger strike," Pitts O'Keefe said. "Additionally, ICE explains the negative health effects of not eating to its detainees, and they are under close medical observation by ICE or contract medical providers."

    The report was based on 10,000 documents dating from 2013 to 2017 — during both the Obama and Trump administrations — obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, along with interviews with six formerly detained individuals who participated in hunger strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

    The report covers hunger strikes by at least 1,378 people from 74 countries across 62 publicly and privately run immigration detention centers in 24 states, including 19 hunger strikes at two facilities in Arizona, the Eloy Detention Center and the Florence Detention Center. The hunger strikers included people protesting their detention or living conditions, as well as some struggling with mental illness, the report said.

    The report noted that a detained person’s "refusal to eat may be the last option available to voice complaint, after all other methods of petition have failed."

    The report found that ICE sought court orders to subject hunger strikers without legal representation to involuntary medical procedures including forced feeding, which violated their due process rights.

    Cho said she was also troubled by the "complicity of medical professionals at ICE detention centers" in subjecting hunger strikers to involuntary medical procedures, which have been condemned as violating medical ethics by the American Medical Association.

    During the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration detainees increasingly have resorted to hunger strikes to protest health and safety conditions inside detention centers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    "One thing we know in particular is that hunger strikes have been on the rise due to the COVID-19 pandemic, given all of the abuses that we've heard about during the pandemic, and the failure of ICE to provide basic safety measures for people, and the desperation people are feeling," Cho said.

    In April 2020, correctional officers at the La Palma Correctional Center fired pepper balls and pepper spray to quell a peaceful protest among detainees objecting to the inadequate provision of protective equipment to quell the spread of COVID-19, a government watchdog inspection found.

    ICE officials noted that the inspection by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General did not find that the use of pepper balls and pepper spray violated the performance-based national standards for use of force adopted by the agency in 2011.

    Cho called on the Biden administration to look for more humane ways to respond to hunger strikers inside immigration detention facilities.

    "The Biden administration certainly has a new opportunity to investigate both its reliance on immigration detention in the first place, and also a new course of treatment for people who are engaged in hunger strikes in a much more humane way," Cho said.

    The report's findings show that ICE often resorts to extremes such as forced feeding rather than trying to address the concerns raised by hunger strikers, she said.

    Legal representation can sometimes help resolve the issue, Cho noted.

    In 2017, ICE sought an order to force-feed a detainee who was on a hunger strike at the Florence Detention Center in Arizona because he felt unsafe in a housing pod because of his ethnicity. But the detainee, who was represented by the ACLU of Arizona and Perkins Coie law firm, started eating again after ICE agreed to move the detainee to a different housing unit, Cho and the report said.