September 8, 2023
The group of women refusing food inside NWDC continue their brave hunger strike to demand attention to ICE and GEO Group’s violations of human rights, and indifference towards the pain of a mother who lost her son.
Tacoma, Washington — Today marks the second day that five brave immigrant women detained at Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) have decided to conduct a hunger strike in defiance of mistreatment and indifference on the part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prison profiteers GEO Group. The hunger strike began yesterday, its primary focus being the government agency’s refusal to allow Martha Gomez to attend the funeral of her son, who died less than a week ago in a car accident. ICE alleges that the refusal springs from Gomez’s criminal charges, despite the fact that she already served time in prison for said charges and is detained at NWDC while her immigration case, a civil procedure, makes its way through the system.
Four more women – Veronica Ramos, Clementina Arellano, Graciela Zamora, and Diana Ramirez – have joined Martha Gomez in solidarity with her plight. Furthermore, they are using the hunger strike to highlight the brutal conditions they face inside NWDC. In particular, the hunger striker’s demands include improvements to the poor meals they are fed, respect for people with special diets, and, echoing Gomez’s struggle, a more just process for people with criminal charges.
In particular, the hunger strikers are asking that ICE allow them to leave the brutal immigrant prison on bail while their immigration process makes its way through the courts. Without serving time or a specific timeline for their process, the hunger strikers, like thousands of other immigrant detainees, are forced to wait indefinitely under inhumane conditions before even seeing an immigration judge.
“Truly, they [NWDC authorities] humiliate us so much. Sometimes they come to clean the space, sometimes they don’t. We have to clean often. They don’t even do a good job, or they disregard us. And then they make fun of us for even trying to improve our conditions a little bit,” said one of the hunger strikers to La Resistencia. Additionally, conditions inside NWDC have reached such a desperate point that one of the strikers, Graciela Zamora, was taken to solitary confinement after expressing suicidal ideation.
La Resistencia highlights the issue that in the past ICE has approved permission to attend funerals out of state for those that have requested. The group has vowed to hold daily vigils outside Northwest Detention Center every single day until ICE allows Marta Gomez Avalos to visit her son’s funeral or the women decide to end their strike.
La Resistencia is a grassroots organization led by undocumented immigrants and people of color that have been oppressed by the immigration enforcement system. We are based in Washington State working to end the detention of immigrants and stop deportations.
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