‘Shoved the tube so hard it tore my nose’: Kurdish film-maker recounts ‘inhumane’ ICE force-feeding
By Josie Calloway ·
You think you know what medical care looks like when you’ve spent enough time in an ER, seeing people bleed out from preventable failures—the kind of system failure that makes you…
When Protest Becomes a Crime Against Medicine
You think you know what medical care looks like when you’ve spent enough time in an ER, seeing people bleed out from preventable failures—the kind of system failure that makes you question if the whole damn structure is salvageable. But nothing prepares you for this: the calculated cruelty of state-sanctioned torture disguised as treatment. The story emerging from Port Isabel, Texas, isn't about managing immigration; it’s about institutionalized abuse.
Gabar Choli, a Kurdish film-maker and activist, endured nearly eight months of involuntary medical procedures at an ICE detention center after going on a hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions. He wasn't suicidal; he was using the only tool available—his body—to force accountability for systemic neglect. Yet, the response from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its parent agency, DHS, was not care, but coercion. The Guardian reported Choli’s harrowing account: how ICE officials allegedly "shoved the tube so hard" that he tore his nose from the inside. This wasn't medicine; it was a calculated assault on autonomy.
The Business of Breaking Spirits
What chills you to the bone is the sheer legal scaffolding built around this brutality. Authorities, citing vague fears of "imminent life-threatening harm," proceeded with invasive feeding tubes despite clear protests against them. Consortiumnews.com highlighted that in several documented cases, detainees were force-fed without having adequate legal representation.
The medical consensus rings alarm bells: Dr. Chanelle Diaz called the practice out plainly—"That is just not medical care, that is torture." Even when DHS spokespersons attempted to cloak their actions in legalese, claiming they respected an individual’s "right to refuse," the reality on the ground was one of absolute power imbalance. The system demands compliance. They are determined to break you, as Choli stated, because admitting a hunger strike exists means admitting that the conditions—the overcrowding, the lack of basic dignity—are so abysmal that people must starve themselves for awareness.
A History Written in Forced Feeds
This isn't some isolated incident of poor judgment by overworked staff; it is institutional policy. The pattern of using forced labor and punitive detention under the guise of state necessity echoes a history we should never forget: the Gulag System. In both instances, the mechanism is identical—the state uses starvation or invasive medical control to enforce compliance with political will. When the system decides that your protest is merely a threat to "facility security," they justify stripping you of bodily autonomy and treating you like chattel.
The law should protect life; instead, it seems designed to facilitate pain. The moment we allow profit motives—or in this case, punitive enforcement motives—to pull away from care ethics at the bedside, we open the door to these atrocities. We are witnessing a profound failure of public health infrastructure when the state treats human beings as mere legal problems to be solved with tubes and restraints.
What happened in Port Isabel is not merely an abuse; it is a terrifying regression. It proves that when detention centers become more important than human dignity, the American system has no ethical guardrails left.