Hunger strikers sue to prohibit forced feeding at Tacoma immigration detention center

TACOMA, Wash. — Hunger strikers, including one who reportedly hasn’t eaten for nearly a month, have sued to prevent being force-fed as they protest conditions at the immigration detention center on the Tacoma Tideflats.

Northwest Detention Center detainees Viacheslav Poliakov and Raquel Martinez Diaz asked U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle last week for an order to prohibit them being force fed. They also sought to keep hunger strikers from being threatened with segregation or being put in solitary confinement for their protests.

Settle canceled a hearing in the case Tuesday, and plans to issue a written decision, according to court records.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement argues it hasn’t requested force-feeding orders for either detainee, but that it shouldn’t be prevented from doing so.

If the agency did ask for an order, it would be “a necessary intervention so ICE can safeguard the health and well-being of its detainees,” the department said in a response to the lawsuit. “Furthermore, courts in this District, including this Court, have granted such orders on at least six occasions.”

Martinez Diaz has been eating regularly, and Poliakov is accepting fluids and medical monitoring, ICE told the court.

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Supporters say at least four detainees are on hunger strikes — one joined Thursday — and that Poliakov has not eaten for 28 days.

That seemed to match ICE’s timeline for Poliakov’s hunger strike, which the agency said it learned of Aug. 22.

One of the strikers’ main demands is better access to medical care, Maru Mora Villalpando, a representative of an activist group that protests the facility and supports the striking detainees, told reporters Tuesday outside the federal courthouse in Tacoma.

She said they also want “reunification with their children, humane treatment and ending the retaliation for joining the hunger strike, as well as getting minimum wage for the work that they perform there.”

Detainees have held other hunger strikes in recent years to protest conditions at the facility, which is owned and operated by a private contractor, the GEO group.

The lawsuit, filed Sept. 13, argues that Poliakov and Martinez Diaz were using their First Amendment rights “by engaging in a hunger strike to express their views about national immigration policies and how detainees were being treated at the NWDC.”

Poliakov is 23, and Martinez Diaz in about 40, their attorneys said.

Poliakov is a Russian citizen, who has been at the detention center since April 3, ICE told the court. He was ordered deported Aug. 30, and has until Oct. 1 to appeal the decision.

Martinez Diaz is a Mexican citizen taken into ICE custody Aug. 16, and is awaiting deportation proceedings, according to the agency.

Guards violated the pair’s constitutional rights, the detainees allege, by threatening them with solitary confinement, forced feeding and problems for their immigration cases.

“Those threats have been fulfilled in the past,” Edward Alexander, one of the attorneys representing the detainees, told reporters. “They are not idle threats.”

Such threats caused many other detainees to quit the hunger strike recently, he said.

Asked about Poliakov’s condition, another attorney for the detainees, Junga Subedar told reporters: “He’s really in bad shape. ... He is adamant about going on, continuing on the hunger strike, even though it weakens him every day.”

ICE’s court filing said Poliakov’s reasons for his hunger strike were “his dissatisfaction with the food, his insomnia and his difficulty in retaining an attorney to prepare for his upcoming immigration court date.”

He’s in a medical unit, where he has access to a telephone, recreation yard, television and electronic tablets, the agency said.

ICE defines a hunger strike as when someone misses nine meals in a row, which officials told the court is not the case with Martinez Diaz.

The agency argued that the purpose of immigration detention is to make sure detainees are present when they’re to be deported.

“The public interest would not be served by allowing detainees to either die or medically deteriorate while detained,” ICE wrote the court.

Another argument officials gave: “If detainees are allowed to die or suffer permanent harm to themselves as a result of a hunger strike, other detainees will likely infer that ICE is indifferent to their well-being, thereby increasing the likelihood of disorderly conduct.”

KIRO