A Kurdish man who was force-fed over the course of eight months while on hunger strike in US immigration detention has spoken out about it for the first time, describing how much the process harmed him physically and psychologically.

Gabar Choli, a film-maker and activist now living in Canada after being deported, described how he endured the coercive treatment – a practice widely considered torture by international human rights groups – often twice a day after being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when his asylum application was denied.

“It just broke me, mentally broke me,” Choli said in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. “It came to a point that I decided to write my body an apology letter.”

ICE officials force-fed Choli at the Port Isabel federal detention center in Los Fresnos, south Texas, from late May 2025 until he was deported in January of this year, a Guardian investigation found. Choli had resorted to a hunger strike to protest against conditions at the facility and to push for a resolution to his immigration case.

He described how a team of detention center guards would physically restrain him while ICE medical staff forcibly inserted a feeding tube through his nose and down his esophagus and pumped nutritional liquid into his stomach.

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

Much of what happens in ICE detention has been hidden from public view over successive administrations.

An investigation by the Guardian last week found that the second Trump administration used court orders in plans to subject at least 10 hunger strikers in ICE detention to involuntary medical procedures.

However, it has since emerged that the number is even higher. DHS sources told the Guardian over the weekend that between January 2025 and 4 August 2026 ICE obtained court orders for involuntary medical treatment for 18 hunger strikers. The Guardian has previously found that while some people are force-fed, some give in and eat at the last minute when presented with a court order.

DHS sources also said that ICE “provides involuntary medical treatment only to prevent imminent life-threatening harm or death”.

In court records reviewed by the Guardian in relation to Choli’s case and other hunger strikers, “involuntary medical treatment” is used as an umbrella term that includes the option of force-feeding.

According to court records related to Choli, ICE requested the court give the agency permission “to conduct routine physical examinations and routine laboratory testing, administer hydration, and if necessary, use restraints to accomplish this involuntary monitoring, treatment and administration of nutrients, fluids and medication(s), by way of intravenous measures and/or a nasogastric tube".

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Dozens of pages of federal court records verify that Choli was subjected to force-feeding, including declarations by ICE doctors and officers. Combined with interviews with medical and legal experts and an interview by phone with Choli himself, much of the secretive process is revealed. His case could be the longest documented case of force-feeding in ICE detention to date.

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He began a hunger strike in detention in California and was transferred to Texas. The DHS and ICE then requested an emergency court order from a federal judge to force-feed him and perform other medical procedures, such as involuntary intravenous hydration, involuntary blood draws and urine analysis tests through forced catheterization, documents from the southern district of Texas federal court seen by the Guardian show.

“I am not suicidal,” Choli wrote in a letter to the federal judge overseeing his proceedings. “I am using hunger strike as the only available option to protest the abuse and mistreatment.”

The DHS and ICE said in court records that force-feeding Choli was necessary for his health, but also that his prolonged hunger strike posed “a serious threat to the security and good order” of the detention center. They further accused Choli of attempting to “manipulate the immigration system” by striking.

During his first force-feeding sessions, he recalled in an interview, occasions where a nurse working for ICE “shoved the tube so hard” that “he tore my nose from the inside.” After such sessions “they would take me to solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood and drink the blood from inside [my throat],” he added. Many of his court records are sealed, so the Guardian is not able to corroborate some details in Choli’s account.

He did not have legal representation throughout the eight-month ordeal. The federal judge presiding over his case, Rolando Olvera, denied Choli’s request for legal assistance and extended the force-feeding order several times at ICE’s request, according to records filed in the southern district of Texas federal court.

Choli suffered injuries and medical complications, including swollen sinuses, damage to his esophagus and stomach problems, court records show.

“That is just not medical care, that is torture,” Dr Chanelle Diaz, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University’s medical center, told the Guardian. Diaz has reviewed cases of other detained immigrants subjected to force-feeding and advocated for their release.