2007-06-17 00:00:02 -

TRENTON, New Jersey (AP) - A federal judge has ruled that officials at a county jail in New Jersey can use intravenous or feeding tubes to force-feed an immigration detainee who is on the brink of starvation after mounting a hunger strike.
Samuel Izrailovich Shevaniya, whom authorities believe is from Russia, mounted his strike June

9 to protest plans by immigration officials to deport him.
It is not clear why Shevaniya, who has been in the jail since June 7, has been ordered deported.
Several state jails in recent years have rented some of their space to the U.S. government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement wing to hold detainees who are either waiting to see an immigration judge or have been ordered deported.
Hunger strikes by immigration detainees happen periodically in New Jersey; last March, several detainees at the Monmouth County jail refused to eat for several days to protest poor treatment.
But detainee advocates and attorneys say they do not remember a time when ICE asked for a court order to make a detainee eat.
«We haven't seen this,» Subhash Kateel, co-director of Families for Freedom, a New York City group that opposes the detention of noncriminal immigration violators, told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Saturday newspapers.

«For the most part, they put them in isolation and threaten to force-feed people,» Kateel said.
According to a petition filed yesterday by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark and obtained by The Star-Ledger, Shevaniya has «steadfastly indicated he has no intention of eating,» and if he doesn't get food soon «his health will continue to deteriorate and he will ultimately die.