Three asylum seekers of South Asian origin remain on a 90+ day hunger strike at the LaSalle Detention Center, an ICE processing facility in Jena, Louisiana. A fourth man has recently been deported to India in an appalling example of medical neglect. At least two of the asylum seekers have been subjected to forced feeding through a nasogastric tube, a practice that is widely viewed as a human rights violation (one day the U.S. medical profession will have to answer for its complicity in the crimes of the U.S. immigration detention system). Lawyers and visitation volunteers are in contact with the hunger strikers. The exciting news is that one man was released from ICE custody on Friday and is safe with his family in Seattle. That same day, however, the ICE New Orleans Field Office refused to accept a petition calling for the release of the remaining hunger strikers. Over twenty-six thousand people have signed the petition.
These men are not fighting alone, but have joined an ongoing and escalating resistance within immigrant jails and prisons, where hunger strikes have been waged repeatedly over the past several years. Meanwhile, in the neighboring state of Mississippi, prisoners are fighting a guerrilla war of self-defense against a calculated campaign of state lynching and extermination. La Lucha Sigue…
Prisoner hunger strikes are an “ethical challenge.” First, a challenge to the state: particularly the U.S. state, whose historical existence is inconceivable without the the carceral clade of prisons, plantations, concentration camps, chain gangs and labor camps, military detention camps, immigration detention centers, extraordinary rendition black sites, etc…They are a challenge not to the state’s ethics, since the state has no ethics, but a challenge in the sense that we challenge someone to a game, since the oppressed will always have to resort to a certain ludic spirit and military classicism in the face of an overwhelming asymmetry of force. Hunger strikes are a form of ethical warfare–adapting tragic elements of Cold War game theory–against the state that forces it to respond with violence (thus revealing the hollowness of its claims to consensual hegemony) or with a tactical retreat, tactical compassion (thus revealing its weakness, its loss of control). There is no “letting die” in the case of hunger strikes. The death of a hunger striker is a necropolitics masquerading as indifference, or perhaps as respect for “individual autonomy.”
Second, a hunger strike (and particularly a hunger strike taken in the genocidal conditions of the U.S. prison and immigration detention systems, where torture, assassination, medical abuse, physical and sexual assault, etc., runs rampant) is an ethical challenge to those of us on the outside who have thrown our lot in with the project of liberation, or abolition, as it’s sometimes called today. What are our obligations to these hunger strikers, what can we do for them? When someone is willing to die, not only for their own liberation but for the liberation of the community, how do we respond in a way that both cares for them and honors their sacrifice? A hunger strike hurts the state, but it also hurts us. Hunger strikers have loved ones, family, friends, who want to be reunited with them. For those of us who don’t know them personally, we are still chilled by the horror of their physical degeneration, by the agonizing passing of time towards an undetermined point where a sacred human life may be lost, by the impotent rage of having to depend on the machinery of the state, the courts, the medical profession, all these apparatuses of oppression, to show some “human decency,” which actually would just be a sociopath’s mocking impression of clemency. At the same time, we feel accused in our indolence, our half-measures. They are willing to give up everything. What are we willing to do?