Immigration officials have been force-feeding a half dozen detainees who began a hunger strike to protest conditions at a processing center in Texas where they are being held, the authorities said Thursday.

In a statement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that as of Wednesday night, 11 detainees in El Paso had refused to eat; four other individuals at different ICE detention centers across the country were also on hunger strike, officials said.

Of the 11 people starving themselves in El Paso, six were being hydrated and force-fed under court orders issued by a federal judge in mid-January — about two weeks after those detainees stopped eating, ICE said. Two of the 11 people began their hunger strike on Wednesday, officials added.

“The ICE Health Services Corps is medically monitoring the detainees’ health and regularly updating ICE of their medical status,” the agency’s statement said. “Efforts are being taken to protect the detainees’ health and privacy.”

A lawyer for two of the immigrants on hunger strike and an advocate who said her nonprofit group had been in contact with nine of them said that those who were force-fed have had to endure pain and had bled from their noses. (Force-feeding is performed using a tube through the nose.)

Many of the detainees, the lawyer and the advocate said, came to the United States seeking asylum after fleeing persecution in India. Since arriving in the United States, they have had to withstand verbal abuse from immigration officials and threats about deportation, the lawyer, Ruby Kaur, said.

Ms. Kaur said those who went on hunger strike were placed in solitary confinement as punishment. One of her clients has lost between 40 and 50 pounds as a result of the strike, she said.

“You’re fleeing persecution, you come to this country, and you are being tortured here as well,” she said. “The only avenue they have is to peacefully protest.”

The advocate, Christina Fialho, the co-executive director of the nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants, said as many as 30 people could be on hunger strike in El Paso, a higher figure than the one ICE provided.

The use of force-feeding, she said, represented an escalation in the tactics used by immigration officials on detainees.

“It’s barbaric,” she added.

An ICE spokeswoman did not comment directly on the allegations leveled by Ms. Kaur and Ms. Fialho. But the agency said that it does not retaliate in any way against hunger strikers and that it tells detainees about the negative health effects of not eating. Officials closely monitor the food and water intake of detainees who have been identified as being on hunger strike, they said.

Since May 2015, Freedom for Immigrants has documented 1,396 people on hunger strike in 18 immigration detention facilities across the United States, Ms. Fialho said. Generally, she added, detainees starve themselves as a way to protest unsanitary and abusive conditions at their holding facilities as well as the length of their detention, which often appears to them to be indefinite.

Although court orders have allowed officials to administer fluids to detainees intravenously, Ms. Fialho said she was aware of only one other instance — in Georgia in 2017 — when a court allowed someone to be force-fed at an immigration detention center. Attempts to locate the court orders referred to by ICE on Thursday were unsuccessful.

Force-feeding people is an “uncomfortable practice” in which “you put in a tube through the nose, and then you pour a nutritional formula through the tube,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at New York University’s School of Medicine.

“Putting the tube through the nose is often painful, particularly if the person is resisting,” Dr. Caplan said.

People who are fed involuntarily can lose muscle mass, Dr. Caplan added, and in the Texas case, prisoners could become infection-prone.

Top medical associations have condemned the practice. In a 2006 statement, the World Medical Association said “the forced feeding of hunger strikers is unethical, and is never justified.”

The number of migrants asking the United States for asylum out of fear of returning to their home countries jumped nearly 70 percent in 2018 compared with 2017, according to Department of Homeland Security data released in December. And as the number of people held at ICE processing centers has swelled, the conditions at them have come under scrutiny.

Last fall, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General issued a 15-page “alert” after an unannounced visit to the Adelanto immigrant detention center in Southern California. Federal inspectors there found that 15 out of 20 cells they looked at had what they described as nooses made of braided bedsheets hanging from vents. The report also raised questions about inadequate medical care and “overly restrictive segregation” of the immigrants housed at the ICE processing center in Adelanto.

In the meantime, the Trump administration has made several efforts to limit refugees. In November it announced new rules giving the president vast authority to deny asylum to virtually any migrant who crosses the border illegally. The Supreme Court, however, refused to allow the Trump administration to immediately enforce its new policy.

Around the same time in December, the Trump administration announced that the United States would begin requiring people seeking asylum at the southwest border to wait in Mexico for a court ruling on their cases.

Elisha Brown contributed reporting and Jack Begg contributed research.

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