Several immigrants are refusing to eat to protest their prolonged detention at a South Texas immigrant camp, according to two of them and an attorney for one of the men. The action is the latest in a rash of hunger strikes by ICE detainees this year.
An Iranian Christian man and a Turkish man belonging to a persecuted Muslim minority say they, along with three other Iranian men and six Iranian women, have gone without food since Sept. 29 in the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville, Texas.
Their sole demand is to be moved out of the reach of the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals — which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — where the Trump administration has so far prevailed in its effort to detain immigrants indefinitely. Soon, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over the administration’s controversial “mandatory detention” policy that has kept immigrants from getting out on bond.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t respond to The Marshall Project’s request for information on the hunger strike, including questions regarding the well-being of the detained people and the agency’s response to their refusal to eat. The private prison company that runs the camp, Management and Training Corporation, referred questions to ICE.
One of the men in the hunger strike, Alireza Fadaeieshkiki, sought asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border last year. In Iran, he had been arrested, severely beaten and persecuted by the government for distributing Bibles, serving as a pastor and hosting underground Christian church meetings — activities banned by the theocratic Islamic regime, according to his attorney and a sworn declaration shared with The Marshall Project.
“I have [a] problem with torture in Iran,” Fadaeieshkiki said in a call on Oct. 2. “Here, I may lose [my] life.” He said ICE placed him in solitary confinement for going on a hunger strike. A few days later, Fadaeieshkiki texted, via a jail messaging app, that guards “bring me food at every meal, but I don’t touch it … I’ve only been drinking water for seven days now.”
A hunger strike is an extreme form of protest in which a person refuses to eat or ingest vital nourishment until another party agrees to specific demands.
Between 2015 and 2020, at least 1,600 detained immigrants engaged in hunger strikes while in ICE detention, according to research published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine. People can survive the first couple of weeks with water alone. But the researchers found that once a detainee begins to eat again, the health complications can be severe, and can include cardiac arrest, delirium and seizures. Detained people who were already ill can face risky aftereffects.
There have been at least a dozen hunger strikes in ICE detention camps this year, according to Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, a nonprofit working to abolish immigration detention. Dozens of detainees at the Delaney Hall facility in New Jersey engaged in a hunger strike in May that drew widespread public attention.
“It’s unsurprising we are seeing this number of hunger strikes this year,” Ghandehari said. The Trump administration “wants to keep as many people in detention as long as possible, or deport them — that is the goal.”
Many strikes go unreported, said Haddy Gassama, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, because ICE often quickly isolates people who strike, or transfers them to other remote immigrant camps.
“There is a long history of people who feel they have no other choice but to go with this very extreme form of resistance and protest,” Gassama said. “Immigration detention, the way it looks right now and the way it has been built, makes people feel as if they have no other option.”
Fadaeieshkiki has been detained since he first sought asylum at the border nearly 20 months ago. He said that other Iranians held with him at the immigrant camp were engaging in the hunger strike, as well as Mehmet Cagaslilar, a member of a persecuted Muslim sect in Turkey who sought asylum in December 2024 and has been detained ever since.
Cagaslilar called The Marshall Project from solitary confinement on Oct. 5. Speaking in English, he said he believed the United States was a “freedom country.” Separately, in a text message in Turkish, Cagaslilar said he was swept into a “witch hunt” by the Turkish government, which labeled his Muslim sect a terrorist organization — though it is not listed as such in the United States. “I come here running,” Cagaslilar said during the call, in English.
In a new report, the ACLU said ICE’s typical response to hunger strikes includes isolation in what the agency calls “segregation units”; transferring anyone leading the strike to different camps; and in instances of prolonged strikes, force-feeding through intubation.
Three times since Fadaeieshkiki has been detained, immigration judges have refused to consider his request for release on bond, according to his attorney, Alexis Beshears. The judges cited the Trump administration’s “mandatory detention” policy requiring that people stay locked up for the duration of their immigration proceedings, she said.
That policy has been struck down in nine appeals courts around the country, but it remains in place in the 5th Circuit.
There are more than 18,000 petitions for release due to wrongful detention, known as habeas corpus petitions, pending in federal courts in the circuit, according to HabeasDockets.org, a project of the grassroots organization Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative.
Beshears submitted more than 300 pages of documentation for Fadaeieshkiki’s asylum claim, including arrest warrants and medical records translated from Farsi to English, to support his claim of torture by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Beshears said a photo shows a sign plastered on the door of Fadaeieshkiki’s apartment, after the government seized his home, stating the occupant engaged in “illegal activities for the promotion of Christianity, causing public disturbance, misleading individuals and distributing books and organizing unauthorized underground meetings.”
The immigration judge declined to review the file, Beshears said, and instead preemptively canceled Fadaeieshkiki’s asylum case, stating the application was filled out incorrectly. Fadaeieshkiki appealed that decision and has been waiting for months in detention without a response from the Board of Immigration Appeals.
Beshears took Fadaeieshkiki’s case pro bono and said she thinks of him every day. After speaking with him on Oct. 5, she said, “He sounds very weak. He sounds defeated. I pray he gets his day in court.”