As the July 26 deadline approaches for the government to reunite some 3,000 immigrant parents and children separated under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” program, one immigrant detention center in South Texas has been releasing a few people weekly, after they pass their “credible fear” interviews, in which they describe why they are afraid to return to their countries and need asylum. Those who remain have begun resisting the hurtful and disordered conditions of their captivity, some with extreme measures such as hunger strikes. The Port Isabel Service Processing Center is located about 35 miles from Brownsville and minutes from the Gulf of Mexico, on lonely potholed roads. The facility feels isolated even before one enters its double razor wire-enclosed grounds. Inside, according to detainees, the isolation feels so overwhelming that some have resorted to extreme measures.

The Intercept has spoken to two dozen detainees at Port Isabel since late June. All are women, though the detention center also houses men. Many women complain of feeling completely cut off from the outside world. In some areas of Port Isabel, they say, televisions are turned on, mainly to telenovelas and soccer games — but when immigration-related news comes on, guards lower the volume or change the channel. It is extremely difficult for the detainees to talk with people outside of Port Isabel by phone. They or their callers must pay for the calls, but speaking over the prison phones is like talking through cellophane or foil. Words tend to be incomprehensible, requiring extremely slow speech, exaggerated diction, and shouting. And calls are frequently dropped. Everyone complains about the food. On one visit to Port Isabel, I saw a detainee being given her regulation lunch: two slices of white bread with two slices of deli meat without condiments, a small apple, and a 6-ounce bottle of something that resembled Kool-Aid. Breakfast has about the same number of calories, and so does dinner. There are no snacks, no coffee. The same food is served day in and day out. Detainees report that they find the food distasteful and say they still feel hungry after eating. The women who spoke to The Intercept say they are losing weight, and those whose families send them money supplement Port Isabel’s diet with ramen noodles and junk-food snacks for sale at inflated prices in the commissary. But many inmates have no money.

Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Hunger Strikes and Other Desperate Measures Other inmates have abandoned the food because they are staging hunger strikes. One woman told me that she had been allowed to call her child only once in several weeks of detention. She went on a hunger strike — una huelga de hambre, as she called it — for two days. As a result, she said, she had gotten one call each day for the previous three days. She said that a rolling hunger strike has been occurring at Port Isabel for the past two weeks, with some 15 women fasting for a couple of days, then eating while another impromptu group fasts. Port Isabel has not made public the number of people it is detaining, but one woman said that each women’s dorm has 25 people in it, and there are five dorms. Mothers in Port Isabel walk around in a constant state of grief and anxiety, some displaying symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. Most have had only a handful of calls with their children. One said she has been separated from her 12-year-old since early June and has not talked to him even once — nor does she know where he is, except that he is in New York state. Several told me that they have a hard time remembering what day or date it is. Hours after she was released on bond from Port Isabel last week, one woman recalled how she and other detainees got together, discussed their problems remembering what had happened to them even as recently as the day before, and decided as a group to request a visit to the facility’s psychologist. “We were worried we were losing our minds,” she said. Another women told me that a woman “went crazy” last week, “probably because she couldn’t take the separation from her child anymore.” She became so aggressive in a common room, and so frightening to the other detainees, that she was taken away, possibly, the detainee said, to solitary confinement — a place that the hunger-striking women have been threatened with if they continue fasting.