“We’ll send you to your cozy Gulag”. Russian asylum seekers join hunger strike in Georgia ICE facility describing neglect and threats in long detention

Detainees at the Folkston D. Ray James ICE Processing Center in southern Georgia began a hunger strike on October 6, a spokesperson for the Campaign to Shut Down FIPC told the local broadcaster WSAV. The centre is run by the private prison company GEO Group under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Advocates estimate that at least 73 people have joined, according to the Guardian.

One of the strike’s organisers, Idris Makhmudov, is a Russian citizen who has been detained since July 2024. He has reportedly been placed in solitary confinement, according to Monica Whatley of the “Campaign to Shut Down the Folkston ICE Processing Center”, who spoke to the Guardian.

The strikers want to be released while their asylum cases continue, seek protection from re-detention and deportation, as well as reunification with loved ones. Makhmudov drafted an open letter in June that was signed by 45 men, eight of them Russian citizens, who had been held for between 16 and 32 months at the time. “We are those who have been imprisoned for years, yet have never been accused of any crime,” it reads.

The men asked for asylum on arrival to the United States, so they are classed as “arriving aliens” and treated in law as if they were still at the border. Many say bond requests, parole, custody reviews and habeas corpus petitions have all failed. “For those of us held here in Georgia, it feels like rights exist only on paper,” the letter says.

The neglect and the threats

A report written in Russian by two detainees, Aleksei Kovalko and Aleksandr Borovkov, describes life inside. It is dated September 14 and signed by 14 men. “The aim of this prison is to deport as many people as possible and to create conditions in which it is impossible to defend your case in immigration court,” they write.

The authors accuse the warden, whom they do not name, of “open xenophobia”. They say that earlier this year he told Russian-speaking detainees, in Russian: “Don’t worry, we’ll send you to your cozy Gulag.” On another occasion, Kovalko says, the warden told a group of detainees: “None of you will be released into freedom in America—all of you will be deported.”

The report says meaningful medical care is effectively absent and that there is no dentist. Kovalko says his complaints of toothache over almost two years were never logged. One of the authors recalls a doctor telling him: “It is not my job to cure you; what matters to me is that you don’t die.” In January 2025, he says, after he fainted during a blood test, staff at the neighbouring Folkston ICE Processing Center left him for hours in a cold concrete cell with no mattress.

The authors describe mattresses little more than a centimetre thick, mouldy lettuce and tortillas. They say the drinking water smells bad, while staff drink bottled water that detainees cannot buy. TVs blare until the early hours. Kovalko says he was sent to the disciplinary isolation unit for switching one off at 2 a.m. after a guard ignored his requests.

The authors say post from lawyers is withheld or delayed, sometimes past court deadlines, and that evidence stored on detainees’ phones cannot be copied or printed. Kovalko says he has been allowed to speak to his wife, who was detained in Louisiana, four times in two years.

Borovkov says ICE refused his written requests for his own arrest and detention records, even though, he says, the agency’s detention standards require it to provide them. He says an officer told him he was not allowed to defend himself.

Facility oversight

GEO Group’s operation in Folkston has failed federal oversight before. In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general reported on an unannounced inspection of the neighbouring Folkston ICE Processing Center and its annex. It found violations of detention standards on medical care, facility conditions, grievances, segregation, communication between staff and detainees, and the handling of detainees’ property, and made 13 recommendations to ICE.

ICE’s own inspectors rated D. Ray James “good” after their first visit in June 2026. They found it compliant with 22 of 24 detention standards, including medical care, food, grievances and segregation, and none of the 28 detainees interviewed alleged mistreatment; however, the facility had been given four weeks’ notice of the inspection. Inspectors did flag two “priority” failures: suicide-watch checks logged up to 58 minutes apart instead of every 15, and detainees kept in units that did not match their security classification. One detainee told inspectors he was being treated for tooth pain with painkillers while on a waitlist for an outside dentist.

Good internal ratings have long been the norm. A May 2025 review by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog, found that ICE inspectors rated detention centres “acceptable” or better in 238 of 241 inspections between 2022 and 2024, despite recording more than 5,400 deficiencies. Facilities are usually told of inspections four weeks in advance. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, which carried out unannounced inspections, was dissolved this year.

An investigation by the Project On Government Oversight found this August that ICE has never given a failing grade to a facility that, like D. Ray James, holds only ICE detainees.

GEO Group referred the Guardian’s questions to ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to them.