For seven days, the metal tray arrived three times every twenty-four hours, slid across the threshold of a concrete cell in Willacy County, Texas. It carried food cooked for private profit—rice, beans, canned vegetables—and three times a day it left untouched. By October 5, 2026, Alireza Fadaeieshkiki’s voice on the telephone was thin and halting, the register of a thirty-eight-year-old man whose liver and kidneys had begun to consume their own reserves in the humid air of the Rio Grande Valley. Guards bring me food at every meal, but I don’t touch it, he wrote in a message sent through a prison application from inside the solitary confinement unit of the El Valle Detention Facility. I’ve only been drinking water for seven days now.

Fadaeieshkiki is an Iranian Christian pastor. Seven years ago, in Tehran, he abandoned Islam for a faith practiced in living rooms with the curtains drawn, distributing translated Bibles and holding communion in secret. In Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps views such gatherings as treason. State security agents eventually raided his apartment, beat him, and padlocked the entrance, tacking an official notice to the wood that charged the tenant with illegal activities for the promotion of Christianity, causing public disturbance, misleading individuals and distributing books and organizing unauthorized underground meetings. Knowing that an indictment before a revolutionary court carries capital consequences, Fadaeieshkiki fled across borders and continents, arriving at the southern boundary of the United States in early 2025 to ask for asylum.

Instead of safety, he found an administrative machine from which there is no scheduled exit. For nearly twenty months, Fadaeieshkiki has lived behind razor wire at 1800 Industrial Drive in Raymondville, an impoverished rural municipality forty miles north of the Mexican border. He has committed no crime under Texas or federal penal law. He has an eligible family sponsor in the United States who submitted verified financial affidavits and offered him a bed. Yet three separate immigration judges refused even to convene a hearing to determine whether he might be freed on bond. In their ledgers, his physical custody belongs to an automated decree issued from Washington, one that strips judges of the discretion to weigh flight risk or human danger.

On September 29, 2026, Fadaeieshkiki decided that if the law would not move, his body would. He was not alone. In separate wings of the facility, ten other detainees—including Mehmet Cagaslilar, a Turkish dissident imprisoned for twenty-two months following political purges in Ankara, three other Iranian men, and six Iranian women—stopped eating. Their protest was not a demand for instant legal status, nor did it ask for the dismissal of their deportation files. Their solitary plea was jurisdictional: they demanded to be loaded into a transport van and driven across state lines, out of the territory governed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

The Black Hole of the Fifth Circuit

To understand why eleven people would risk cardiac collapse and irreversible neurological injury to be transferred to another federal circuit, one must understand how administrative law has fractured the country into two distinct legal realities. For nearly three decades following the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the distinction between two provisions of the federal immigration code governed every detention center in the country.

Under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A), the executive branch was directed to hold noncitizens arriving at official ports of entry seeking formal admission without bond while their initial claims were processed. By contrast, under 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a), anyone apprehended inside the interior of the United States—whether they crossed a river six days earlier or lived quietly in an American suburb for twenty years—fell under a separate rule. Under that section, noncitizens retained an automatic procedural entitlement: an individualized hearing before an independent immigration judge, who evaluated whether the government had shown cause to hold them, setting a financial bond or conditional release if they proved they were neither dangerous nor likely to abscond.

On July 8, 2025, that architecture was dismantled by administrative fiat. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued an internal directive declaring that any noncitizen present within the United States without prior formal admission would henceforth be classified as an applicant for admission. In a single bureaucratic pivot, the Department of Homeland Security swept every undocumented migrant in the interior under the harsh mandatory detention mandate of § 1225(b)(2)(A), barring immigration judges from scheduling bond hearings and asserting the power to detain tens of thousands of people indefinitely, without bail, until their removal cases conclude.

The policy was immediately challenged in federal courts across the country. In the months that followed, nine of the nation’s eleven numbered regional circuit courts—including the First, Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits—struck down the administration’s interpretation. Citing decades of statutory precedent and the fundamental procedural protections established in Mathews v. Eldridge, these appellate courts ruled that denying individualized bond hearings to people living within the nation’s borders violates both the plain text of immigration statutes and the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. More than four hundred federal district judges across forty states issued orders invalidating the policy in over 4,400 individual cases.

In the Deep South, however, the federal courts moved in the opposite direction. Covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the Fifth Circuit—anchored by a hard-right conservative supermajority—embraced the administration’s theory. In February 2026, the court handed down its ruling in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Blanche, holding that any immigrant who entered without inspection remains perpetually subject to mandatory lockup without any recourse to bond. Five months later, in United States v. Rodriguez, a three-judge panel stayed a raft of release orders issued by lower-court judges. Along with the Eighth Circuit, the Fifth Circuit transformed its three states into an island of executive supremacy, where the right to ask an independent judge for bail ceased to exist.

The practical result is a regional geography of rights. A mother seeking asylum in California or New York who is detained by federal authorities can demand a bond hearing within weeks, establish her ties to the community, and sleep in her own bed while her asylum case works its way through the immigration courts. But if that same mother is picked up in Houston, or transferred by ICE to a private detention center in the cotton fields of Raymondville, she disappears into an indefinite administrative prison without bail, regardless of whether she has committed an offense or has a sponsor waiting outside.

According to data compiled by HabeasDockets.org, an initiative of the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative, more than 18,000 petitions for writs of habeas corpus challenging no-bond detention are currently backlogged in federal district courts within the Fifth Circuit alone—nearly a third of the 55,000 petitions filed nationwide since January 2025. In the Southern District of Texas, where Fadaeieshkiki filed his federal petition on June 1, 2026, those dockets are moving at a glacial crawl. Federal magistrates are inundated with thousands of near-identical complaints, while immigration officials lean on Fifth Circuit precedent to keep cells full.

The reason it’s never been litigated before is because it’s never been done before, noted Rebecca Cassler, an attorney with the American Immigration Council who argued against the mandatory lockup policy before the en banc Fifth Circuit. The government’s interpretation of the law is really novel. The policy is that all of these people never get a chance to have bond hearings, even people who present no risk of flight or danger, which are the classic legal standards.

The Warehouse in the Valley

To walk the perimeter of El Valle Detention Facility is to understand how policy choices are converted into bricks, razor wire, and private revenue. The facility sits on land that has long functioned as a carceral testing ground. In the late 2000s, the site housed the Willacy County Correctional Center, a sprawling complex of Kevlar dome tents that detainees and Valley residents nicknamed Ritmo—a grim play on Guantánamo Bay. In 2011, federal authorities canceled an earlier contract with its private operator, Management & Training Corporation (MTC), after ten separate federal inquiries uncovered documented patterns of physical abuse, sexual harassment, and systemic medical malpractice.

Four years later, in February 2015, prisoners held in the squalid Kevlar domes rose up in protest over broken plumbing and unaddressed medical crises, setting fire to the compound and rendering it uninhabitable. Yet the infrastructure of incarceration rarely stays dormant for long when local municipal bonds require servicing and private corporations seek yields. By 2019, MTC had rebuilt the complex as a concrete, brick-and-mortar penal facility, and ICE moved back in. Today, El Valle warehouses more than nine hundred men and women behind perimeter walls, a central node in an archipelago of 144 immigration prisons that currently hold nearly fifty thousand noncitizens nationwide—facilities where, federal records show, 44.7 percent of detainees have never been convicted of a criminal offense.

Inside these walls, the administration’s mandatory detention regime does not operate in the abstract; it crushes people under the weight of open-ended time. Mehmet Cagaslilar, a Turkish national who fled political retribution against his religious minority group following the failed 2016 coup in Turkey, arrived in the United States in December 2024. When he crossed into American custody, he expected the protections promised by international refugee conventions. Instead, he spent the next twenty-two months shuffled through detention facilities, culminating in Raymondville.

I come here running, Cagaslilar said on October 5, speaking by telephone in English from a solitary cell where guards moved him shortly after he refused his tray. He had assumed, he explained, that the United States was a freedom country—a place where a persecuted man would be heard, assessed, and allowed to demonstrate his claim before a neutral official. Instead, he found that his presence on Texas soil placed him outside the law’s protection.

For Fadaeieshkiki, the legal ordeal took on the absurd qualities of an administrative labyrinth. His pro bono attorney, Alexis Beshears, assembled more than three hundred pages of corroborating evidence: certified translations of Iranian judicial warrants, medical documentation of his physical mistreatment by Revolutionary Guard interrogators, and sworn affidavits from underground congregation members who had fled before him. Yet an immigration judge in Texas dismissed his asylum petition entirely on a technical pretext, citing an alleged filing defect on the standard forms. His asylum case has remained frozen on appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Virginia, for months, with no hearing date set and no mechanism to review his physical custody.

He sounds very weak. He sounds defeated, Beshears said on October 5, after speaking with Fadaeieshkiki for the first time since his fast entered its second week. I pray he gets his day in court.

When Fadaeieshkiki realized that the federal habeas corpus petition he filed in June would likely languish until he succumbed to illness or agreed to be deported back to Iran, he saw no remaining avenue. I have [a] problem with torture in Iran, he said in an interview with The Marshall Project from a detention phone on October 2. Here, I may lose [my] life.

A History of Weaponized Bodies

The decision to starve oneself in custody is never an act of impetuous anger; it is the final, agonizing tactic of those from whom every other instrument of agency has been systematically stripped. It is an acknowledgment that the only property an incarcerated person still owns is their own flesh, and that the only remaining choice is whether to surrender that flesh quietly to the state or use it to compel the world to look.

Historical parallels are frequently invoked in carceral struggles, but their value lies in precision rather than sentiment. In 1981, when Irish republican prisoners led by Bobby Sands began their hunger strike inside the Maze prison, they were reacting to an administrative decree: the British government’s unilateral abolition of Special Category Status, which recategorized political prisoners as common criminals. Sands and his fellow strikers starved themselves to secure five specific demands, including the right to wear their own clothes and the right to associate freely. The comparison illuminates the dynamic of desperation: both the republican prisoners in Northern Ireland and the asylum-seekers in Willacy County deployed bodily self-deprivation against an unyielding executive bureaucracy that refused to grant them procedural recognition.

Yet the parallel also exposes the distinct cruelty of the American situation. Sands and his comrades were combatants in a protracted sectarian conflict, prosecuted under criminal law and fighting for political recognition. Fadaeieshkiki, Cagaslilar, and the nine other strikers are civil detainees who have been charged with no crime, held under administrative warrants, and denied an exit not because of what they have done, but because an agency memo reinterpreted a preposition in the federal code. They do not demand special status or immunity from deportation hearings; they demand only the basic hearing that the Fifth Amendment guarantees to anyone standing on American soil.

A more resonant historical precedent lies in the fractured legal landscape of the 1850s, following the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. Under that federal statute, geography dictated human liberty: special federal commissioners were legally mandated to deny basic evidentiary procedures, habeas corpus, and trial by jury to Black people accused of escaping enslavement, even as northern legislatures enacted personal liberty laws to protect them. Where an individual walked determined whether they possessed rights or existed as property subject to summary seizure.

The analogy has limits, of course: modern immigration detention is not chattel slavery, and its prisoners are not bought and sold as property on the auction block. But it is an administrative penal system monetized by private corporations like Management & Training Corporation and CoreCivic, operating under the extraordinary judicial deference of the plenary power doctrine. And like the fugitive slave regime of the nineteenth century, it creates a geography of arbitrary enforcement where an individual’s fundamental constitutional rights vanish simply because federal authorities transported them south of the Red River.

The Official Defense and the Coming Confrontation

The Department of Homeland Security and its spokespeople dismiss any suggestion that the detention regime violates fundamental rights. Defending the policy against the growing wave of lawsuits, DHS spokesperson Lauren Bis maintained that the thousands of habeas filings are the work of judicial obstructionists rather than genuine civil rights claims. Bis stated that more immigrants are filing habeas cases due to many activist judges who have attempted to thwart President Trump from fulfilling the American people’s mandate. Despite what she termed a historic number of injunctions, she added, DHS is working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detention centers to their final destination—home.

In its formal legal arguments, the Department of Justice insists that its reading of 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A) represents the plain command of Congress: that noncitizens who have not been formally admitted by an immigration officer remain applicants for admission in perpetuity, and that mandatory detention is essential to ensure that people do not disappear into the interior before deportations can be executed. To allow immigration judges to grant bond to hundreds of thousands of people, government attorneys argue, would cripple the administration’s enforcement capacity and create an unbearable administrative burden.

On October 1, 2026, the procedural stalemate finally reached the nation’s highest bench. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha (Docket No. 26-104), agreeing to decide whether interior noncitizens are subject to mandatory detention under § 1225(b)(2)(A) or retain the right to individualized bond hearings under § 1226(a). The case centers on Ricardo Aparecido Barbosa da Cunha, a Brazilian national who lived in Massachusetts for twenty years without a criminal record before being arrested during a routine morning commute in September 2025. The Second Circuit ruled that he was entitled to a bond hearing; an immigration judge promptly found that he posed no threat to society and ordered his release. The Trump administration appealed.

Yet for the eleven men and women starving in Raymondville, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments in Barbosa da Cunha offers cold comfort. Supreme Court terms move on calendars measured in seasons; the human body deteriorates on a schedule measured in days. By day seven of a hunger strike, the body has depleted its glycogen stores and begun ketosis; by day twenty, muscle tissue is severely degraded; by day thirty, the risk of acute liver failure, permanent peripheral neuropathy, and fatal heart arrhythmias rises exponentially.

Furthermore, federal court dockets reveal what typically happens inside South Texas detention facilities when hunger strikes persist. ICE has repeatedly responded to fasting detainees at El Valle and the nearby Port Isabel Processing Center by securing emergency, ex parte orders from federal judges authorizing involuntary nasogastric feeding. Under this procedure, medical staff restrain a noncitizen, force a plastic tube through the nasal cavity into the esophagus, and pump nutritional liquid directly into the stomach—a practice that the United Nations Human Rights Council and the World Medical Association have repeatedly condemned as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment that amounts to torture.

There is a long history of people who feel they have no other choice but to go with this very extreme form of resistance and protest, said Haddy Gassama, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. Immigration detention, the way it looks right now and the way it has been built, makes people feel as if they have no other option.

Between 2015 and 2020, research published in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine documented that at least 1,600 noncitizens carried out hunger strikes inside ICE facilities. In 2026 alone, there have been at least twelve organized strikes nationwide, from Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, to rural county jails across the South. It’s unsurprising we are seeing this number of hunger strikes this year, said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. The administration wants to keep as many people in detention as long as possible, or deport them—that is the goal.

Neither ICE nor Management & Training Corporation responded on the record to inquiries regarding the medical condition of the eleven striking detainees in Raymondville. Their silence is routine; carceral authorities have long understood that opacity is the most effective shield against public scrutiny.

As night fell over Willacy County on October 7, 2026, Alireza Fadaeieshkiki remained in his solitary cell, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning unit and the heavy closing of steel doors. He has lived through state harassment in Iran, fled his home, and survived a transcontinental journey, only to find himself trapped in a flat patch of South Texas brushland where the rule of law has been replaced by geographic exception. His demand is not an appeal for clemency or a request for mercy. It is simply a demand to be taken somewhere where a courtroom still listens to evidence, where human liberty cannot be revoked by administrative memo, and where a person is not forced to starve their own body simply to be heard.