When Mahatma Gandhi speared civil disobedience by means as simple as a hunger strike, few imagined what those in power would devise six decades later to counter a peaceful protest.

This is the Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib era where the tortured are forced to eat, and forced to stay alive in hellish conditions.

Immigrant Detainees in New York’s Varick Federal Detention Center in Lower Manhattan where greeted by SWAT teams, pepper spray, beatings, and isolation in segregation cells for having started a hunger strike.

Last Tuesday approximately 100 immigrants refused to go to the mess hall and declared they were on hunger strike.  The response was brutal, yet very well rehearsed after years of practice with so-called “enemy-combatants”, this response is now widely used against immigrants awaiting deportation.

There are no guarantees, no human rights, whether cooks or architects, legal residents or not, this case yet again reminds us that just anything can trigger a system intent on criminalizing non-violent and non-criminal human beings.

When asked, the authorities reply that all allegations “are simply untrue”.  Are we to be so naïve and forget that Immigration Detention and Homeland Security authorities have gone to great lengths to conceal the truth about immigrant deaths?

Thousands of pages of government documents have been kept under wraps and were only made public thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and The Times by means of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Obama administration disclosed, “more than one in 10 immigration deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.”  The statement “more than one in 10” constitutes a truculent reminder that the damage in terms of lives lost is far greater.

The American public expresses no alarm or disgust with this injustice.   How desensitized have we become?

We salute our college Nina Bernstein from the New York Times for her relentless unmasking of a nightmare no human being deserves.

Powerless and complicit authorities are not doing anything to stop an ordeal only lucrative to private contractors building and operating detention centers.