ICE Force-Fed a Kurdish Filmmaker for Eight Months. Nobody Had to Answer for It.

ICE Force-Fed a Kurdish Filmmaker for Eight Months. Nobody Had to Answer for It.

Funny how the government always has a word for what it does to you, and that word is never the right one.

Gabar Choli is a 40-year-old Kurdish filmmaker and asylum seeker. He crossed into the U.S. from Canada in 2022, asked for protection, got a work permit, checked in with ICE like he was told. A judge denied his asylum claim but granted him protection from deportation to Iran, where he’d face death threats for his Kurdish activism. Then Trump came back, and at a routine February 2025 check-in, ICE arrested him. Standard. The machine does what the machine does.

What came next is the part they don’t want you reading about.

Choli went on hunger strike at the Port Isabel detention center in south Texas, demanding humane conditions and resolution of his case. The only leverage a man in a cage has is his own body. So he stopped eating. And the government’s response was to send five guards into his cell, wrestle him to the concrete, shackle his wrists and ankles, drag him to the infirmary, pin him to a bed, and shove a feeding tube through his nose and down his throat.

Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

“Two guards would hold my feet; two hold my hands; one hold my head,” Choli told the Guardian. “They would shove tubes in my nose.”

They did this to him. Twice a day. For nearly eight months.

He could taste his own blood. His nose swelled. His esophagus scraped raw. They’d take him back to a solitary cell afterward where he’d choke on blood. “It just broke me, mentally broke me,” he said. He was never given a lawyer. Most of his court records are sealed. The medical staff at Port Isabel didn’t respond to questions from the Guardian. The U.S. attorney’s office in the southern district of Texas didn’t respond either. Funny how nobody ever responds when the questions get specific.

The Trump administration has not officially acknowledged force-feeding anyone in immigration jails. But the Guardian’s investigation found that since January 2025, ICE sought court orders to subject at least 10 hunger strikers to involuntary medical procedures. Then DHS sources admitted the real number is 18. Eighteen people. Court-ordered. Force-fed. And you hadn’t heard about it, had you?

Ask yourself who benefits from sealed records and no lawyers and a press that can’t get a single medical staffer on the phone.

DoD (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

DHS put out a statement, because of course they did. They said ICE “respects an individual’s right to refuse medical treatment where appropriate” but may seek “judicial authorization for appropriate medical interventions” when someone faces “serious risk of death.” Appropriate medical interventions. That’s what they call five men pinning you down and ramming a tube through your nose until it tears. A Columbia medical professor who reviewed the case records said it “likely amounts to torture.” But what does she know. She’s just an expert.

Here’s what gets me. Choli wasn’t some criminal mastermind. He was a guy who got a drug-smuggling charge in Canada over a kilogram of opium, did his nine months, and spent the years since advocating for an independent Kurdistan. He had death threats. He came here asking for shelter. The system chewed him up, held him in a cell, tried to pressure him into signing his own deportation to the country that wants him dead, and when he refused to eat, they pinned him down and made him eat anyway.

He was deported in January. To where, the article doesn’t say. He’s in Canada now, talking to reporters, because that’s where someone finally listened.

Eighteen people. Eighteen court orders. Zero acknowledgment. Zero accountability. And the records are sealed, so you’ll never know the full story. That’s not a glitch. That’s the design.