After nearly a week, more than 140 immigrants detained in the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) have concluded their hunger strike in protest of inedible food, often served at irregular hours. The action marked the 20th hunger strike in the Tacoma facility this year.
Detainees in the center’s G3 unit began the protest last Tuesday, and were joined by detainees from the G4 unit the following morning. The participants then established contact with the immigrant solidarity group La Resistencia, which has relayed communications from detained migrants to the broader public.
According to La Resistencia, the meals at the facility are terrible and not nutritious. Receiving raw meat is not uncommon, and detainees have to rely on chips, ramen, and other processed food from the commissary—sold at exorbitant prices—to get by. Dinner is frequently served after midnight.
“Hunger strikes are often the only powerful tool that people have to be able to call to attention what is happening,” says La Resistencia director of organizing Josefina Mora-Cheung.
Days into the strike, participants entered into negotiations with employees of GEO Group, the private prison corporation which owns and operates the NWDC on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to a press statement by La Resistencia, the detainees stopped the hunger strike over the weekend after company representatives promised them new menus, improved food quality, and bigger portions.
The NWDC has been beset with allegations of poor conditions for many years. Researchers with the University of Washington Center for Human Rights have accused ICE and GEO Group of not only poor food but also denying immigrants access to proper health care while in custody and even failing to prevent or respond to sexual abuse within the facility. Under the second Trump administration, conditions have only deteriorated as the NWDC has been consistently overcrowded, with occupancy rates sometimes exceeding 90 percent of the center’s 1,575-person capacity.
In response to ICE’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, protests against immigration detention have multiplied across the country. Mora-Cheung says the number of hunger strikes in the NWDC this year has already surpassed last year’s count of 16. ICE has been quick to retaliate against organizers like Cuban immigrant Rogelio Enrique Bolufé Izquierdo, who was deported to Ecuador shortly after he started a similar protest in late May.
Local and state leaders have also tried to intervene. In July, a federal judge sided with the Washington State Department of Health’s request to audit conditions within the detention center, a ruling which was later reversed by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
Washington State and Oregon Congressmembers Representatives Emily Randall and Maxine Dexter showed up at a rally organized by La Resistencia on Saturday to lend their support for the hunger strike.
The NWDC’s status is currently up in the air after ICE did not renew its 10-year contract with GEO Group for the facility late last year, and instead opted for a short-term agreement. Randall suggested to KUOW that the move could be an effort by the federal government to enrich Trump allies like GEO Group founder and CEO George Zoley. In July, the private prison company CoreCivic sold two California detention centers to ICE for $1.5 billion.
In an email, ICE spokesperson Jason Chudy said any claims of “subprime conditions” in the NWDC were “FALSE.”
“All detainees are provided with 3 meals a day, an adequate supply of clean drinking water or other beverages, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries,” Chudy wrote.
La Resistencia says that the detained immigrants were determined to strike again if the promised food improvements are not honored.
“Come to events like La Resistencia’s to show people on hunger strike that they’re not alone, because that’s what ICE and GEO [Group] continuously tries to make them believe,” Mora-Cheung said.