In June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.
South Asian Americans Leading Together, a nonprofit organization, has noted an uptick in Indian asylum seekers entering the country. Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine. The increase has been caused by a mix of political and economic factors. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified. According to Oxfam, the richest one per cent of India’s population now owns more than fifty per cent of the country’s wealth. As a result, thousands have been fleeing the country; many fly to Central America, where they begin a treacherous journey north to the United States. Earlier this summer, a six-year-old Indian girl died of heatstroke near the Arizona-Mexico border. Over the past several months, the U.S. has been trying to stop Indian migrants before they even reach the border. Last week, Mexico deported more than three hundred Indian migrants who were waiting to cross into the U.S., under a deal with the Trump Administration to avoid tariffs on Mexican exports. In 2016, two anonymous ICE officials described to Buzzfeed the agency’s unofficial policy toward Indian asylum seekers: “Keep them out. If you catch them, detain them.”
When Kumar reached California, he spent a few days in a packed cell, and then he and other asylum seekers were put on buses and planes—with chains around their hands, feet, and stomach, “as if we were some criminals,” Kumar recalled—and sent to New Mexico. Kumar ended up in the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE facility managed by a private contractor, where he says his treatment worsened. The officers spoke to Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers in English and Spanish, and refused to provide translators (except when they filled out medical questionnaires), despite the fact that the migrants spoke only Punjabi and Hindi. Kumar and other Indian asylum seekers were vegetarian because of their religious beliefs, and the staff sometimes taunted them and made them wait until everyone else got food before they could eat. But what made Kumar most upset was that he and the other migrants were subjected to “animal-like treatment”—foul language, aggression, and punitive responses to minor violations of the rules. “When they cursed at the Indians and treated them badly, I couldn’t stand seeing it, so I would speak out against them,” Kumar told me. “If I said something, they would put me in the SHU”—the Special Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement—“for fifteen days, ten days, by myself in a small room.” (ICE did not respond to my request for comment.)
While at Otero, Kumar was sent to the SHU eight or nine times. Each time, it was for an alleged minor infraction, often for speaking back to officers. Once, he told me, a security officer photocopied asylum materials for others who had requested the service, but not for him; when he accused the officer of racism, he was sent to the SHU. On a different occasion, he said, ICE officers accused him of striking another migrant; he saw that there were cameras in the facilities, but, when he asked to see video footage of the incident, they refused and sent him to the SHU. In 2017, representatives from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (O.I.G.) investigated Otero and suggested that the staff in the center were misusing solitary confinement. “Some detainees were locked down in their cells for violations of minor rules without required written notification of reasons for lock-down and appeal options,” the investigators wrote, in a report. “Documentation of daily medical visits and meal records for detainees being held in segregation was also missing or incomplete.”
In March of this year, Kumar learned that an immigration judge had rejected his application for asylum, finding the evidence of persecution he had presented not credible, and had ordered his deportation. Kumar filed an appeal. While he waited, he requested to be released on bond, something he had been asking for since he was apprehended, but ICE refused. Though ICE uses punitive measures against detainees, people in immigration detention are officially being held for an administrative violation rather than for a criminal offense, which means that, except in special circumstances, there is no legal limit on how long they can be held. “I understand the desperation that many detainees feel, where they feel there is no control over any aspect of their life,” Linda Corchado, Kumar’s lawyer, told me.
In July, Kumar went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention and looming deportation. “I decided if I am going to die, I’ll die here,” he told me. When the officers at Otero saw that Kumar had stopped eating and drinking, they sent him to solitary. A few days later, he could hear the officers putting others in SHU rooms near his. He couldn’t see or talk to them and only later learned that five other Indian men had also gone on hunger strike. He did not know what had sparked their protest, though the Otero staff considered him their ringleader, nonetheless. “I had one demand from the beginning,” he told me. “I just want my freedom. I didn’t ask for anything else.”
In mid-July, Kumar and three other hunger strikers were transferred to the El Paso Service Processing Center’s medical unit, in Texas, where Kumar was at times isolated from the others. ICE obtained a court authorization to force-feed them, a procedure that involves pushing a tube through a patient’s nose and down the esophagus. One of the migrants had just been treated for a nose infection, and, as ICE doctors placed the tube in his nostril, he began spitting blood and lost consciousness. According to Corchado, who also represented this detainee, the doctor administering the tubes told him, “End your hunger strike and we’ll stop this.” He ended the strike that night.
Force-feeding is painful and potentially harmful to patients, and organizations including the Red Cross, the American Medical Association, and the World Medical Association consider it medically unethical; in a press release from 2006, the W.M.A. called it “a form of inhuman and degrading treatment.” But as an increasing number of ICE detainees have gone on hunger strike—there have been at least a thousand three hundred and ninety-six cases since 2015—the agency has often resorted to the practice. In January, a group of Indian asylum seekers dubbed the “El Paso Nine” banded together in a collective hunger strike. A court gave authorization for them to be force-fed, but the feeding was stopped after two or three weeks in the face of mounting pressure from politicians, activists, and lawyers. Seven of the strikers were eventually deported, and two were released to await rulings on their cases. But forty-nine members of Congress signed a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding an investigation into the use of force-feeding by ICE. As a result, earlier this year, representatives from the O.I.G. visited the El Paso facility again, this time to observe the practice of force-feeding. The O.I.G. recently released its findings to Congress. It seemed to find a level of impunity in the facility’s operations. In the course of four years, there were a hundred and thirty-seven grievances filed against ICE officers involving allegations of physical or verbal abuse, but only one officer was fired and four re-assigned. However, the O.I.G. concluded that force-feeding in El Paso was carried out “to ensure the detainees’ safety and the safety of the facility.”
Kumar was taken off the feeding tube after nearly a month and then persisted in his strike. His weight dropped, as did his blood pressure and heart rate. He started getting severe abdominal pains. “I was literally seeing him die in front of me,” Corchado told me. Kumar’s lawyers argued that he had a First Amendment right to go on hunger strike, and that an alternative to force-feeding existed: ICE could release him on bond and into the care of a community hospital. They also argued that the medical treatment Kumar was receiving in ICE custody was putting him in danger; an independent doctor, who pored over more than four hundred pages of Kumar’s medical records from El Paso, found that ICE doctors had hardly visited Kumar. The doctor concluded, in her testimony to the court, that it was “the worst medical care I have seen in my ten years of practice.”
On September 12th, the court allowed ICE to resume force-feeding Kumar. The judge wrote in his opinion that he couldn’t order ICE to release Kumar, but he scolded the government for not having given Kumar an independent doctor’s evaluation and for what the judge called its “penological” treatment of him. “An individual seeking asylum is not akin to a criminal prisoner,” he wrote. A week later, ICE offered Kumar a deal, which he accepted: he would be released if he resumed eating and wore a monitoring device. Corchado speculates that, with the judge’s opinion and growing public scrutiny, Kumar had become a liability for ICE.
At the end of his hunger strike, Kumar weighed a hundred and seven pounds. He left the El Paso facility on September 26th and is now staying with an immigration activist in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is eating solid foods again, and gardening, and he recently enrolled in E.S.L. classes. But he can’t run like he used to, and he’s still regaining his vision after going partially blind from starvation. “I’m not fully recovered,” he told me, two weeks after his release. “There are some mental issues—I can’t remember everything. But I’m better than before.”
In September, the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to remand Kumar’s asylum case back to the immigration judge, concluding that the initial ruling, which judged Kumar’s testimony to be not credible, was “clearly erroneous.” Kumar’s case will be heard again, in December, by the same judge. His odds are not great—more than forty-one per cent of Indian asylum seekers were ordered to be deported from the United States last year, and the percentage is likely to be even higher this year. Still, he remains hopeful. When I asked him to reflect on how he had managed to last two months without food or water, he became thoughtful, noting that he had never considered the length of his strike before. He added, “I only thought, freedom or death—I’ll get one of the two.”
