A hunger strike is underway at the ICE facility in Tacoma, according to the activist group La Resistencia. The group told KIRO that around 140 detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center are refusing food in protest of the conditions there.
Two US congresswomen arrived at the facility for an unannounced tour Saturday to investigate the strike and the detainees’ claims. At the same time, a protest was held outside the fence in solidarity with the detainees.
“It’s just a depressing place,” Marcos Angel Hernandez told KIRO 7. “You can tell it drains everybody.”
Hernandez knows the ICE facility better than most. He wasn’t there for the protest; he was there to visit his father.
Hernandez has been to the NWIPC six times from Portland since his father was arrested outside an Oregon Home Depot earlier this month. He’d been in the US for nearly 30 years.
Hernandez recalled frantically trying to figure out what happened to him.
“We go, and his car is there. Everything that he bought is there,” he said. “But he’s not there.”
Hernandez said his father is sick.
“It’s honestly kind of scary,” he said.
According to La Resistencia, Hernandez’s father is not the only one who is sick. The activist group reports two housing blocks in the detention center are now on a hunger strike, protesting a lack of medical services and quality food.
Organizers said there have been plenty of hunger strikes before, but they are becoming more frequent.
“We have been an organization for over 12 years. We have supported, on average, a dozen hunger strikes a year,” Josefina Mora-Cheung of La Resistencia said. “This year, this is the 20th hunger strike we are supporting.”
US Representatives Emily Randall of Washington and Maxine Dexter of Oregon toured the facility.
They said 1,458 people are currently detained at NWIPC.
The representatives said they were allowed to see the kitchen, but not the area where detainees receive medical care.
They reported speaking to a detainee who is part of the hunger strike, but when the representatives asked detention center administrators about the hunger strike, they said they were only shown paperwork about areas of the center not participating in the strike.
“They misled us about who was on a hunger strike and what the status of that was,” Dexter said.
“It makes it very hard to parse what is actually happening in these facilities when we are hearing separate accounts,” Randall said.
KIRO 7 reached out to ICE and The GEO Group, the company that operates the facility, for comment on the strike and conditions but did not hear back.
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