Hunger strikes never work.
He said it plainly. We will not change what we do because someone goes on a hunger strike. If it gets bad enough we will force feed them. We will get a court order and force feed them.
When Tom Homan said that on national television it was not a slip. It was the state telling you exactly how it sees the bodies in its custody. Force feeding is not care. It is mechanized violence dressed up as procedure.
A hunger strike is the last weapon of the powerless. When every form of leverage is stripped away the body becomes the final line of resistance. The state answers that resistance with a restraint chair and a tube. That is not protection. That is domination.
History is clear. From Gandhi to the suffragettes starvation has been a political act. A refusal. A mirror held up to power. And every time the response is the same. Break the body so the system does not have to face itself.
Concurrently in the early 20th century British and American suffragettes fighting for the right to vote adopted the hunger strike when imprisoned.
Confronted by women who refused to eat the British government chose physical subjugation over political concession. They initiated institutional force feeding a brutal process where plastic tubes were forcibly rammed down the nasal passages or throats of prisoners. The practice was recognized even then not as a medical intervention but as a punitive tool designed to violate bodily autonomy and assert absolute state control over the dissidents body.
Guantanamo Bay and the normalization of the tube. Decades later the theater of operations shifted from colonial prisons to the black sites of the post 9 11 security state. At the Guantanamo Bay detention camp hunger strikes became a systemic recurring response to indefinite detention without trial.
Rather than addressing the legal black hole in which these detainees existed the American military apparatus formalized force feeding as a routine administrative procedure.
Under the guise of preserving life the state normalized the use of the wrap around restraint chair. Detainees were bound at the head torso and limbs while thick plastic nasogastric tubes were lubricated and forced through the nose down the esophagus and into the stomach. The procedure was performed twice a day sometimes left in place for days causing severe bleeding tears to the nasal tissue and immense psychological terror.
The widespread nature of this practice eventually led to a powerful visceral moment of public exposure in 2013. Human rights organization Reprieve collaborated with the artist and musician Mos Def (Yasiin Bey) to produce a short documentary. In the video Bey volunteered to undergo the exact standard operating procedure utilized by the military at Gitmo.
Here is the harrowing footage of that demonstration.
The resulting footage was harrowing. Within moments of the tube entering his nasal passage the sheer physical agony and psychological panic overwhelmed him. He wept fought against the hands holding him down and ultimately had to cut the demonstration short unable to endure the process.
It proved visually what human rights organizations the United Nations and the World Medical Association had long declared. Force feeding is a form of cruel inhuman and degrading treatment. It is torture by any other name.
Watch the full Reprieve Mos Def force feeding video here:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/08/mos-def-force-fed-guantanamo-bay-video
Additional Democracy Now coverage:
A Question of Our Shared Humanity
This is the truth people contort themselves to avoid. Shared humanity isn’t a debate topic. It’s a fixed point in reality. And every person who watches this happen in silence is signing their own consent form.
ICE, BORTAC, GEO Group staff, the whole orbit of enforcers and protesters, all orbit the same gravitational center. These systems aren’t malfunctioning.
They’re performing exactly as designed: extract the vulnerable, divide the desperate, and funnel human beings into the private prison machinery that feeds on them. When the state shrugs off demands for humane treatment and escalates to force‑feeding, it isn’t a slip. It’s a confession. It’s the machine showing its true design.
What we’re seeing isn’t “excessive force.” It’s the rust making its way through the architecture. An authoritarian impulse so normalized it barely bothers to hide.
This leaves us staring directly at the gap between the constitutional protections we were promised and the reality the state is willing to enforce.
The Eighth Amendment explicitly prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Yet the state routinely deploys methods of physical and psychological torture behind closed doors... methods that completely shred that legal mandate.
They are in civil detention. Not criminals. Not sentenced. Held for paperwork violations. By law they are non‑criminals.
And even if they were criminals the point does not move. You judge a society by how it treats the people it cages.
If conditions are built for suffering. If neglect is so complete that someone chooses starvation to be heard. The issue is not the strike.
The issue is bigger than the cage.
Answering a demand for dignity with a restraint chair and a plastic tube is moral collapse. It shows the state will break a body before it admits the system is the problem.
These camps were built by human hands. They will be dismantled by human hands.
The resistance must continue.
