United States - The Institutional Self Silences the Detained Other's Cries

Event Baseline: In the United States, the internal system for reporting problems in ICE detention centers has failed, leading immigrants to stage hunger strikes to protest inhumane conditions and legal violations.

The institution builds a reporting mechanism to create the illusion of accountability. But the mechanism is dead; it processes forms, not pain. The detainee is not a body to be heard but a number to be managed. The hunger strike is the last physical scream of a self that has been erased from the shared human field. The state self, obsessed with borders and legality, cannot see that it has created a torture chamber for the other. This is thought dividing the world into citizens and aliens, deserving and undeserving. The alien is not an actual being but an image constructed to justify cruelty. Unless the observer becomes the observed and feels the hunger as its own, the system will continue to feed on bodies.