Journalist Aaron Parnas, who posts on TikTok as @aaronparnas1, said in a video that ICE cut open a man’s stomach in Texas to force-feed him. The clip, which he said drew 3.2 million views, 565,400 likes, and 14,400 comments, showed him speaking to the camera in a white shirt and black baseball cap. Red on-screen text in the video read, “NEWS: ICE CUTS OPEN MAN’S ABDOMEN TO PERFORM NONCONSENSUAL SURGERY TO FORCE-FEEED HIM.”
Parnas stated that a detainee on a hunger strike was tortured by ICE officials and that viewers needed to know because a U.S. court approved it. He said a news investigation found that ICE force-fed a Cuban detainee at a Texas detention facility and did not use the usual nasal tube.
Parnas described the process as percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, saying staff cut into the abdomen, inserted a tube that remains in place until another surgery, and pumped liquid into the stomach. He called the method rare in ICE custody, nonconsensual, and something advocates describe as torture.
Court filings in Texas authorized involuntary feeding and a surgical tube option
The Guardian reported that court orders from the Southern District of Texas showed federal immigration officials received a judge’s permission in recent weeks to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker, including with a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure.
The man is described as likely the 19th hunger striker in ICE detention since January 2025 for whom the agency obtained approval for “involuntary medical procedures.” For ICE, allegations of misconduct extend beyond force-feeding, as agents were also accused of using slurs to describe Latinos during immigration raids last summer.
Court records cited in that reporting said the man is held at the Montgomery ICE processing center, a privately run facility near Houston operated by GEO Group. Those records showed he was arrested by ICE on July 22 and declared a hunger striker three days later. A GEO Group spokesperson referred questions to ICE.
An ICE official and a facility doctor requested permission to force-feed him in August, filings show. Federal Judge Andrew Hanen granted permission on August 19. On September 1, ICE asked the judge to extend the order. Hanen extended it this week, with the order set to expire in mid-September, and the order included the option to use surgical tube insertion, according to the court documents reviewed in the investigation.
Typical force-feeding after a judge’s approval involves guards holding a hunger striker while medical staff insert a tube through the nose and pump nutritional liquid into the stomach. In this case, ICE also received permission for a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy, a surgery that makes an incision in the abdomen and leaves a tube in place until it is surgically removed. The Guardian said it had not previously identified that procedure in other force-feeding cases it reviewed.
The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday evening that the man had “resumed eating and drinking again” and was not being force-fed. DHS did not say whether he ended the hunger strike after the latest court order or how many times he had been force-fed before. The man is not being named, and most of his court records are sealed. He does not have current legal representation, the reporting said.
Savannah Kumar, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, said, “The cruelty of the extreme tactics at ICE’s disposal to end lawful protest, including forcibly cutting into a protester’s body to insert a tube in their stomach, underscores the horrors happening outside our view in ICE detention centers.”
She added, “ICE’s brutal use of involuntary medical procedures on hunger strikers demonstrates how degrading conditions have gotten in these hidden places, which is often exactly what hunger strikers are protesting in the first place.” These allegations of mistreatment in detention facilities are not isolated, as seen when an ICE detainee from New Jersey died a day after calling his mother to say he was unwell.
Eunice Cho, an immigrant and civil rights attorney, said, “The high number of verified court orders since January 2025 raises serious concern.” She said the number “suggests several possibilities, none of which are positive,” including that conditions are so bad that more people are hunger striking and that officials are more often turning to forced medical intervention.
Cho also said, “The fact that this person lacks legal representation in a process where the government seeks to subject him to an invasive, involuntary medical procedure performed without consent is a tragedy, and a clear failure of our justice system.” She added, “The secretive nature of these cases, and the opacity of the legal process by which the government brings these motions, should concern us all.”
A DHS spokesperson said the Cuban hunger striker entered the United States unlawfully in 1980 and was ordered deported in 2004. The spokesperson said he was previously convicted of “aggravated assault with a weapon, aggravated battery, drug possession, and carrying a concealed firearm,” that he “received due process and will remain in ICE custody until removed from the United States,” and that facilities still deliver three meals a day to a detained person’s room during hunger strikes.
Viewers of Parnas’s video questioned the court process and the method. One commenter asked which court approved the action. Another asked which judge allowed it and said everyone involved needed to be prosecuted.
A commenter wrote that the procedure is torture. Another said a PEG tube is not rare but that using it in this situation is messed up. One commenter wrote, “We are literally in Nazi Germany and Trump is hitler.” Another wrote that if officials are admitting this, people should imagine what is still hidden. Another comment on the video read, “America are you Great now.”
Published: Sep 7, 2026 08:45 am