'They Were Determined to Break Me': Kurdish Filmmaker Recounts ICE Force-Feeding Horror

In the latest articles in his series on former hunger-striking asylum-seekers who were force-fed while detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Guardian immigration reporter José Olivares on Monday featured a Kurdish filmmaker who said he is still suffering from physical and psychological pain from the torture he endured last year.

Iran-born Gabar Choli told Olivares that he went voluntarily with guards to the infirmary at ICE's Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, the first time he was force-fed.

“First I did not resist," he said. "But after I saw they were torturing me, I started protesting: ‘I’m not coming with you people.'"

From there, things only got worse. Choli said that guards would pin him down while staff shoved a plastic tube through his nose, down his throat and esophagus, and into his stomach to pump him full of nutritional liquid without his consent.

“Two guards would hold my feet; two hold my hands; one hold my head—and they would shove tubes in my nose,” Choli told Olivares. “It’s not easy to be wrestled to the ground twice a day by men that are stronger than you. And you just take it. You have 60cm (2 feet) of tube going through you, and you just feel every centimeter of it.”

“I was respectful. I just told them I am protesting for humane treatment, nothing else,” he said. “But they were determined to break me.”

Choli recounted how one nurse working for ICE “shoved the tube so hard” that “he tore my nose from the inside.”

“They would take me to solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood and drink the blood from inside [my throat],” he said.

The force-feeding continued for the next eight months. One time, a guard's rough treatment injured his ribs and made breathing painful for weeks. Another time, guards “pressed so hard on my shoulder, I thought my chest was going to break in half."

During another session, medical staff ignored Choli's warnings and accidentally shoved the nasogastric feeding tube into his lung.

On some Fridays, Choli agreed to drink the nutritional shakes if guards let him pray and socialize with other detainees.

Court records viewed by Olivares showed Choli suffered injuries and medical issues including swollen sinuses, esophageal damage, and stomach problems following his force-feeding.

Dr. Chanelle Diaz, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s medical center, told The Guardian, "That is just not medical care, that is torture."

Choli admitted: "It just broke me, mentally broke me. It came to a point that I decided to write my body an apology letter.”

The writer and director of short dramas including Waves Goodbye, Love if Loud, and We Don't Understand Him, He Speaks in Broken English, Choli advocates for Kurdish independence and legally sought asylum in the United States upon entering the country from Canada in 2022. He lived legally in Los Angeles, attended his required ICE check-ins, and obtained a US work permit while his asylum case was processed.

An immigration judge denied Choli's asylum claim in 2024, but granted him protection against being deported to Iran, barring the government from sending him back there. He was arrested in February 2025 during a routine ICE check-in following President Donald Trump's return to the White House.

Choli was first sent to the Desert View Annex in Adelanto, California—run by private prison profiteer GEO Group—where detainees have reported medical and mental health neglect, excessive use of force and pepper spray, mold, punsafe drinking water, inadequate food, poor sanitation, and use of solitary confinement, among other alleged abuses.

The following month, as ICE officials pressured him to agree to be deported to Iran—where his advocacy for Kurdish independence could cost him his life—Choli began his hunger strike, demanding better conditions and a fair resolution to his case.

“I am not suicidal,” Choli declared to a judge. “I am using hunger strike as the only available option to protest the abuse and mistreatment.”

Around two weeks after beginning his hunger strike, Choli was transferred to Port Isabel, where he was held in solitary confinement—which survivors and experts call a form of psychological torture—as he continued his hunger strike.

US District Judge Rolando Olvera—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—ordered Choli's force-feeding following a request from ICE, which called the detainee's hunger strike an attempt "to manipulate the immigration system" and “a serious threat to the security and good order” at Port Isabel. Olvera did not meet with Choli, who had no legal representation throughout his ordeal.

The US Department of Homeland Security told The Guardian that ICE “provides involuntary medical treatment only to prevent imminent life-threatening harm or death."

However, under the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Malta, doctors are advised not to force-feed prisoners who choose to hunger strike and understand the consequences of their actions.

During The Troubles in Northern Ireland, British authorities allowed 10 imprisoned Irish Republican Army members, including former Member of Parliament Bobby Sands, to starve themselves to death.

In contrast, force-feeding is institutional policy in US prisons, including the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp in Cuba, where detainees—most of whom were charged with no crime—were force-fed during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

During Trump's two terms, hundreds of people have gone on hunger strike at ICE detention centers across the country to protest overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, spoiled and worm-infested food and water, inadequate medical care, delays in immigration procedures, alleged physical and psychological torture, and other mistreatment.

In May, US Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin dismissed the hunger strikers as a “handful” of detainees whom he falsely claimed were striking because they “want their ethnic right food.”

"This isn't Holiday Inn," Mullin said, referring to the hotel chain.

In early January, ICE deported Choli to Canada, where he was reunited with his siblings. He told Olivares that he had to learn to eat again.

"The price of it was my kidneys, my gallbladder," he said. "My intestines. My being. My bladder, you know, is damaged. Every time I twist and turn, I feel pain. But this is the price you pay for making a stand for what is right.”