At least 10 immigrant detainees have been subjected to force-feeding and involuntary medical procedures, according to an investigation by the Guardian. The detainees are on hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their incarceration, including inedible food and denial of necessary medical treatment.
One victim, a Kurdish film-maker, described being held in solitary confinement, tackled, shackled, and force fed twice daily for eight months. The Homeland Security Agency (HSA) anticipates hunger strike management will cost $169,000 in fiscal 2026.
Shock-delivering gloves planned
On 11 August, the Associated Press reported that the Homeland Security Agency will spend up to $20m to equip its agents with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to the skin of a person deemed uncooperative. The "conductive distraction and de-escalation devices" – branded Glove, for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter – will be supplied by their manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, through a no-bid contract.
Amnesty International reports that portable, convenient electric shock devices made for law enforcement like the glove can be, and have been, used for torture. A prisoner in Kentucky died of a heart attack after 27 successive shocks, directly following 13 Taser hits.
Deaths and child abandonment
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released detainees into the cold without adequate money or clothing. At least two – a Haitian woman, Daphy Michael, and a blind Rohingya man, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar – have frozen to death. Medical examiners are calling both deaths homicides. DHS says ICE and border patrol had "nothing to do" with the deaths.
In a bid to force them to release confidential information about their clients, the administration is withholding payments from organizations that provide legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children. About 25,000 kids, some unable to speak English – or speak at all – have been left to fend for themselves in court.
Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said that since her agency's payments were cut off on 31 July, colleagues "witnessed a seven-year-old child taking a final order to leave the United States this week, without a lawyer", she said.
Legal and ethical concerns
Routine practices of current immigration detention such as prolonged solitary confinement, beatings, and sleep deprivation are widely defined as torture. The Geneva conventions define torture as the infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, by an agent of the state acting in their official capacity, to obtain intelligence or confession or to intimidate, coerce, or punish a prisoner or detainee.
More than 90% of detainees are held in privately-owned immigration detention facilities, but their employees are contractual agents of the federal government. "What they're doing qualifies as torture," a doctor told the Guardian, expressing a contention widely held by medical professionals, ethicists and human rights experts.
In July, the New York Times reported that ICE had arrested 10,000 people in five days, having doubled its daily quota to the 2,000. NPR reported on Thursday that the system through which ICE detainees could report abuse without fear of recrimination "has collapsed", and there's nowhere else to turn, since virtually all other government oversight has been demolished.
Civil liberties and immigrant rights lawyers are flooding the federal courts with lawsuits and petitions for interdiction of these sadistic practices. But any charge of torture is unlikely to get far. The constitution's eighth amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and harm by police or prison guards can be redressed through state civil rights laws. But torture is effectively condoned in the US; federal anti-torture statute applies only to acts committed outside US borders.
