Immigrant Hunger Strike Spreads Across State Lines as ICE Retaliation Threats Backfire

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began threatening immigrant hunger strikers at Tacoma, Washington's notorious Northwest Detention Center with retaliation, they hoped to silence the demands of immigrant detainees.

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For over four weeks up to 750 immigrants placed their lives on the line by starving themselves to demand better conditions at the for-profit GEO Group-owned detention center.

“If we protest or go on strike they will send us to NORCOR and they can bring us up on federal charges for inciting a hunger strike,” a hunger striker told community solidarity group NWDC Resistance in a letter from NWDC. “It’s as if they don’t want us to raise our voices so that they can continue to make their profit.”

Instead, the retaliation attempt by ICE backfired, ensuring the spread of the four-week-long hunger strike to the Northern Oregon Regional Correctional Facility, or NORCOR, a rural Oregon jail. On Monday, May 1, the transferred detainees from NWDC re-launched their hunger strike at NORCOR to mark International Workers' Day.

The move marks the increasing desperation of civil detainees, many of whom entirely lack criminal records, who are placing their lives on the line in a plea for humane and dignified treatment.

“The conditions inside NORCOR are unconscionable,” Oregon-based advocacy coalition, the Rural Organizing Project, said in a statement Monday.

“Hunger strikers are protesting conditions in NORCOR including only having access to one hot meal per day at most, and not being allowed to work and therefore cannot afford phone calls which cost $0.25/min,” the statement continued. “They cannot see outside. They do not have socks. They get milk once per week.”

While ICE claims they are committed to safeguarding the health and welfare of those who are placed in custody – providing them with full medical, mental health and dental screenings – detainees say their lives are endangered by a deportation machine that treats them in a shockingly negligent manner.

“Yesterday it was reported that one gentleman (at NORCOR) has become too weak to get out of bed,” Gorge ICE Resistance organizer Amy Krol told teleSUR.

“This shows how dedicated this act of resistance is for humane conditions but more importantly, how alarming the current situation is,” she added, noting that authorities at the Oregon jail retaliated by revoking his right to watch television.

According to community solidarity group NWDC Resistance, a pregnant woman at the Tacoma facility was refused medical attention when she felt ill and expressed concern for her unborn child. By the time she was taken to the hospital, bleeding, her child had already died, outraging inmates at the detention camp.

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In a similar case, a woman with health conditions requiring prescription drugs was given the wrong medicine by NWDC guards. When she complained that she felt sick, GEO Group personnel claimed she was faking her illness until it was too late and she, too, required hospitalization.

“We're literally talking about blood on ICE's hands,” Maru Mora Villalpando, an organizer with NWDC Resistance, told teleSUR. “They don't even care if you're pregnant or sick.”

Krol agreed, saying that conditions at NORCOR are just as squalid as those in the Tacoma facility.

“Detainees get one hot meal a day and are inappropriately receiving medical services by officers instead of medical staff,” Krol said.

Despite it all, detainees are continuing to express their will to fight back – and coordinate resistance – on a prison-to-prison level.

“Now that they transferred prisoners from Washington to Oregon, both prisons are coordinating their actions because they feel emboldened,” Villalpando said.

“The lieutenant at the (Northwest) detention center threatened detainees with transfers, the women (hunger strikers) told him that it was illegal,” Villalpando added. “He threatened them with shutting down the commissary, they told him it's illegal. He threatened them with solitary (confinement), they defied the lieutenant – told him that it's illegal.”

“The hunger strikers say 'We will never be divided, we will never be defeated, because God is on our side.'”