1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

So ICE is now torturing people on American soil, and there are court orders with judges' signatures to prove it. A bombshell Guardian investigation just revealed that ICE has tried to force-feed at least ten hunger strikers in detention since Trump took office, strapping them down and pushing tubes through their noses to pump liquid into their bodies against their will. One Afghan man was force-fed nearly every day for almost six months. By the end he was so weak he needed a wheelchair, frail and hollowed out, while guards restrained him twice a day. A Ukrainian man with severe bipolar disorder went on hunger strike after the facility allegedly refused to give him his medication. He nearly got the tube too, until his attorney stepped in and stopped it. A Saudi woman collapsed and was rushed to the ER with malnutrition and starvation. She only escaped force-feeding by breaking down and eating. She is still locked up. None of these people were convicted of a crime. Immigration detention is civil, not criminal. They stopped eating because it was the only voice they had left, and the government's response was a restraint chair and a nasal tube. Every serious medical authority on the planet calls this exactly what it is. Torture. The World Medical Association says force-feeding hunger strikers is inhuman and degrading treatment, and is never justified. And if this feels familiar, it should. These are the same methods that shamed us at Guantanamo Bay, where strikers were strapped into a restraint chair the manufacturer literally called a "padded cell on wheels" and had tubes snaked down their noses twice a day. Detainees there called it torture, and one described teams of five guards holding him down while it happened. A federal judge even acknowledged the practice looked like a violation of international law. Now that same chair has simply been turned on immigrants who were charged with nothing at all. And the men running this? Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin mocked the starving detainees, claiming they just wanted their "ethnic right food" and could go home to get it, because "this isn't Holiday Inn." Border czar Tom Homan bragged that ICE would seek court orders to force-feed strikers "if it gets bad enough." This is your government. Funded by your tax dollars. Deciding that a suffering human being's refusal to eat is a problem to be solved with torture. The cruelty is not a glitch. It is the whole point. You break a person's body to break their will, and you do it quietly, behind sealed court records, so no one has to watch. There is no version of a free country that straps a starving person to a chair and forces a tube down their throat to break their spirit. If we let this become normal, we don't get to call ourselves one anymore.