'They Misled Us': Inside the 140-Person Hunger Strike ICE Officials Tried to Hide From Congress

On Saturday, two members of Congress walked into a detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, to check on reports that over 140 people inside had stopped eating. When they asked staff who was participating in the strike, they were handed paperwork describing which sections of the building weren't involved. "It makes it very hard to parse what is actually happening in these facilities when we are hearing separate accounts," one of the representatives said afterward. That gap — between what's happening inside and what officials are willing to confirm — is the real story here.

Over 140 detainees at a Tacoma, Washington detention facility have refused food since August 11 over untreated broken bones and denied diabetes care. When two members of Congress showed up to check, facility staff reportedly showed them the wrong records. Here's what's happening — and why this facility has now had nine hunger strikes in a single year.

What's happening, and since when

Since August 11, more than 140 people detained at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma have refused meals, according to the advocacy group La Resistencia, which maintains regular contact with detainees inside. Their demands are specific and, on their face, uncontroversial: medical attention for people with broken or dislocated bones who advocates say haven't been treated, proper care for detainees with diabetes, and food with enough nutritional content to actually sustain them.

The facility — long known locally as the Northwest Detention Center, rebranded in recent years but unchanged in operation — is run under federal contract by GEO Group, the same private prison company that operates Delaney Hall in New Jersey, where three detainees have died in recent months under circumstances that have drawn their own congressional scrutiny.

On August 15, U.S. Representatives Emily Randall and Marilyn Strickland's colleague — reported in local coverage as Representatives Dexter and Randall — arrived for an unannounced tour to investigate the claims directly. What they found, in their own account, wasn't reassurance. It was a discrepancy: when they asked facility administrators about the strike, they say they were shown documentation about which parts of the building were not participating, rather than a straight answer about who was.

"They misled us about who was on a hunger strike and what the status of that was," one of the representatives told Seattle's KIRO 7.

This facility has done this nine times in one year

What makes this particular strike harder to dismiss as an isolated incident is the sheer repetition. According to tracking by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, the Northwest facility recorded nine separate hunger strikes in just the first several months of 2026 — more than any other immigration detention facility in the country over the same span.

One 26-year-old detainee from Honduras, Steven Chavarria Portillo, went on his seventh individual hunger strike earlier this year, refusing food for 29 days while demanding dental care and release from solitary confinement. He ended that strike in March only after developing a severe stomach ulcer — the same condition a previous hunger strike had already caused him. Guards reportedly told him afterward that he would remain in solitary indefinitely regardless.

That pattern — a detainee refusing food, a demand going unmet, a medical complication forcing the strike to end without resolution — has repeated at this specific facility often enough that advocates no longer describe it as unusual. It's the baseline.

It's not just Tacoma

The Northwest facility's strike is the largest active one right now, but it isn't alone. As of this summer, the ACLU has documented active or recent hunger and labor strikes in at least six facilities across six states — Tacoma, Delaney Hall in New Jersey, Alvarado in Texas, Phillipsburg in Pennsylvania, Baldwin in Michigan, and Adelanto in California. The ACLU's own characterization is blunt: these aren't isolated incidents, but signs of "a detention system that is falling apart at the seams."

The director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project put a harder number on what that means in practice: 2026, by current pace, is on track to become the deadliest year in immigration detention in two decades.

Why oversight keeps hitting a wall

Washington state has spent over a year fighting for the basic right to inspect the facility housing its own residents. State officials won a court ruling affirming their authority to conduct inspections — and inspectors have still been blocked from entering. A University of Washington report published in May, titled "Scrapping the Standards," found that a newly renegotiated ICE contract for the facility actually lowered the accountability standards GEO Group is held to, not strengthened them, even as conditions inside were already drawing scrutiny.

GEO Group itself recently signed a $69 million contract extension to continue running the Tacoma facility. The company did not respond to KIRO 7's request for comment on the strike or the conditions detainees describe.

What this means beyond one facility

Strip away the specifics of Tacoma, and the pattern connects directly to what's playing out at Delaney Hall and elsewhere: a detention system expanding rapidly under contract with private operators, an oversight structure that keeps getting blocked or misled at the point of contact, and detainees left with almost no remaining tool to draw attention to documented medical neglect except refusing to eat. Nine strikes in one facility in one year isn't a communication breakdown. It's what happens when every other channel has already been tried.

The Northwest ICE Processing Center's strike was still active as of this weekend, with a community solidarity demonstration held outside the facility on August 15. Whether it ends the way most strikes at this facility have — with a medical crisis forcing detainees to stop, and the underlying demands unresolved — is, as of this writing, still an open question.

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This article is based on reporting from Democracy Now!, KIRO 7, the ACLU, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, and the advocacy group La Resistencia. ICE and GEO Group have not issued public statements confirming or disputing the specific claims made by detainees and advocates as of publication.