A federal judge in the Southern District of Texas has given ICE permission to insert a surgical feeding tube into a Cuban detainee who has been on a hunger strike since late July, authorizing a procedure that goes well beyond the nasal-tube feeding the agency used on him weeks earlier. The man is held at the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, just outside Houston, and has not been publicly named.
According to The Guardian, Judge Andrew Hanen approved the order on August 19 after an ICE official and a facility doctor requested permission to force-feed the man that same month. The Department of Homeland Security says the detainee entered the United States unlawfully in 1980, was ordered deported in 2004, and was arrested by ICE on July 22, 2026 — three days before he was formally declared a hunger striker on July 25. DHS also says he was previously convicted of aggravated assault with a weapon, aggravated battery, drug possession, and carrying a concealed firearm.
ICE had already force-fed the man through a nasal tube in August, per the same Guardian report, before seeking an extension of that order on September 1. Hanen extended the order in early September, and it is now set to expire in mid-September. Under the extended authorization, ICE was permitted to insert a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy — or PEG — tube without the detainee's consent, a far more invasive step than nasal feeding.
What a PEG Procedure Actually Involves
A percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy requires an abdominal incision to place a feeding tube directly into the stomach, and it carries clinical risks including severe wound infection, internal hemorrhage, and peritonitis, according to research published by the National Institutes of Health. That distinguishes it sharply from nasogastric feeding, in which medical staff insert a tube through a hunger striker's nose and throat and pump nutritional liquid into the stomach — the method ICE used on the same detainee in August. The Guardian's reporting notes the procedure involves permanent tube placement, removable only through additional surgery, with liquid pumped directly into the stomach.
The Montgomery Processing Center is privately operated by The GEO Group under an ICE contract, with an operational capacity of 1,314 beds after a 314-bed expansion in 2019. DHS told the Guardian that the detainee had since resumed eating and drinking and was not being force-fed, and that he will remain in ICE custody until removed from the United States. The department added that its facilities provide food, hygiene, phone and other basic services, and that hunger strikers receive three meals a day delivered to their rooms.
Advocates Say Case Fits a Troubling Pattern
Eunice Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, told the Guardian that poor detention conditions may be driving more hunger strikes, and that officials may increasingly be turning to forced medical intervention rather than less confrontational solutions. She also said the detainee's lack of legal representation in a case involving an involuntary medical procedure amounts to a failure of the justice system; he currently has no attorney. The ACLU of Texas has condemned ICE's use of involuntary medical procedures on hunger strikers more broadly.
Savannah Kumar, another ACLU-affiliated attorney cited in the same report, said ICE's tactics now include forcibly cutting into a protester's body to insert a stomach tube. Cho separately said the number of verified court orders for these procedures since January 2025 raises serious concern — the Cuban detainee is likely the 19th ICE detainee with an approved application for involuntary medical procedures in that span, and ICE had applications approved in 18 hunger strike cases by August 2026 alone.
The Trump administration had previously refused to acknowledge that force-feeding was occurring in ICE detention before later acknowledging the practice, according to the Guardian's reporting. Federal prosecutors typically pursue these orders as emergency civil motions under the All Writs Act, which lets courts issue orders necessary to carry out federal mandates, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Under ICE's own Performance-Based National Detention Standards, facility medical staff must formally declare a hunger strike and begin daily health monitoring once a detainee refuses nine consecutive meals or goes 72 hours without eating.
A Legal Fight With Deep Roots in the Mariel Boatlift
The man's Cuban origin adds a layer of legal complexity rooted in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which brought roughly 125,000 Cubans to Florida. The 2005 Supreme Court decision Clark v. Martinez limited ICE's ability to indefinitely detain non-citizens with final deportation orders to six months when their home country refuses repatriation, a precedent shaped by Cuba's historical reluctance to accept many Mariel-era deportees, according to Prison Legal News. That legal backdrop helps explain why some Mariel-era detainees remain in prolonged ICE custody decades after their orders of removal.
The case also lands amid broader scrutiny of ICE's use of forced feeding nationwide. A June 2021 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights found that between 2013 and 2020, at least 1,378 immigration detainees across 62 facilities engaged in hunger strikes, with ICE regularly seeking judicial orders for involuntary medical interventions. In January 2019, ICE obtained federal court orders to force-feed nine hunger-striking Indian asylum seekers through nasal tubes at the El Paso Processing Center in Texas, drawing international condemnation and a protest letter from 14 members of Congress. In November 2022, The Intercept published the first publicly released video of a federal force-feeding procedure inside an ICE facility, showing an Indian asylum seeker restrained while nurses inserted a nasal tube in El Paso, following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The World Medical Association's Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers explicitly prohibits force-feeding mentally competent individuals who refuse food, calling nonconsensual artificial feeding medically unethical and a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. That standard sits in direct tension with ICE's detention standards, which require monitoring and intervention during prolonged fasts. An August 2026 investigation found that federal immigration authorities had sought court orders to force-feed or perform involuntary medical procedures on at least 10 hunger-striking detainees across multiple states, a surge Hoodline previously reported on in connection with a separate hunger strike at a Florida detention facility.
