WASHINGTON — Polina Chertushkina’s phone did not ring Friday.
Her husband, Andrei Gerdiukov, is a Russian asylum seeker in the third week of a hunger strike at the GEO Group–run immigration jail in Folkston, Georgia. He usually finds a way to call. Instead, Chertushkina said, the morning brought word passing among detainees’ families: a man held in the facility’s medical unit had died.
“My husband didn’t call me today,” Chertushkina told Migrant Insider from Brooklyn. “A guy died today. He was in the medical unit. We found out this morning.”
The day before, Chertushkina saw her husband’s face for the first time in two weeks. On the video call, she said, Gerdiukov told her he had dropped from 205 pounds to 184.
“He is skinny,” she said, and sighed. “His face is skinny.”
He also told her that medical staff had threatened to force-feed the hunger strikers through tubes if they did not start eating, she said.
“I’m just so scared,” Chertushkina said. “I’m trying to fight. To fight the system. To fight the people there.”
Gerdiukov, who has no criminal record, has been locked up since Feb. 22, when Border Patrol stopped the couple’s car on vacation in Miami. During questioning, officers pressed the couple to sign voluntary departure papers and told them they were in the country illegally, according to a dossier the family prepared for reporters. They refused. Their asylum cases were pending, and they had followed every rule.
He is now one of the holdouts in a strike that began Oct. 6. Advocates estimated roughly 500 participants at its peak. ICE told WABE on Oct. 16 that 13 people were still refusing food, and said it would “intervene when it becomes necessary.”
“We didn’t have another choice”
Gerdiukov and Chertushkina fled Russia in 2024 after opposing the war in Ukraine. They are Christians whose faith forbids violence, and they had handed out antiwar leaflets, according to the family’s dossier, which says police detained and interrogated them in January 2024 and that Gerdiukov was beaten.
“In our country, we opposed the war with Ukraine,” Chertushkina said. “People can be punished by Russia for opposing the war. We didn’t have another choice but to flee. America was so welcoming.”
They asked for asylum at the Progreso, Texas, port of entry in February 2024 and were released to pursue their cases. In Brooklyn, she taught English. He worked, including gigs through TaskRabbit, and was the family’s main earner.
“We worked in Brooklyn, paid taxes, followed all work requirements,” Chertushkina said. “We didn’t have any trouble with the law. We didn’t hide from authorities. We were waiting for the court.”
The stop in Miami
In February, the couple traveled to Miami with another Russian asylum-seeking couple, Andrei Mikhailov and Kseniia Volkova of suburban Chicago. Border Patrol pulled over their rental car.
“We had our paperwork in order, but all four of us were detained,” Chertushkina said. “They didn’t tell us why we were stopped. We weren’t breaking any traffic rules.”
The two women were held at the Monroe County Jail, then the ICE office in Miami, then released with ankle monitors. The two men went to the Everglades camp known as Alligator Alcatraz and on to Folkston. Both remain there.
Inside Folkston
At Folkston, Gerdiukov took a kitchen job. Detainees doing that work earn about a dollar a day, according to the family.
“He didn’t want to lose his job,” Chertushkina said. “When you don’t work, it’s more like prison, because there’s nothing to occupy yourself.”
On Sept. 14, Gerdiukov and 13 other men signed a 10-page grievance, obtained by Migrant Insider, cataloguing moldy food, foul-smelling water, freezing cells, sleep deprivation, untreated dental pain and months-long waits for care. The men allege the warden mocked Russian detainees in their own language: “Don’t worry, we’ll send you to your cozy GULAG.” Migrant Insider could not independently verify the remark.
The strike followed three weeks later. According to Chertushkina’s written account, Gerdiukov was placed in isolation Oct. 5 and charged with “Engaging in Group Demonstration” and “Conduct That Disrupts” over a video he recorded on the facility’s visitation system, discussing courts, law and conditions. She told The Current he had been punished for striking. He has since been released from solitary and moved to the adjacent Folkston ICE Processing Center, part of the same complex.
When the men announced the strike, Chertushkina said, staff threatened them with solitary and with deportation to Africa. Some then refused water for three days, she said, while guards ate fast food in front of them. In an Oct. 12 incident described in her written account, staff ate chicken in front of strikers and set a piece in front of each man.
His friend Mikhailov declared his own strike in an Oct. 5 audio recording obtained by Migrant Insider. “It is the only right to protest I have left,” he said. In a second recording from isolation, he said he had stopped drinking water and that guards banged metal sensors on cell doors every half hour through the night.
The strike’s chief organizer, Idris Makhmudov, was deported to Russia within days of its start.
ICE has force-fed hunger strikers before. Medical groups including Physicians for Human Rights condemn the practice as unethical and, in some cases, torture.
Waiting on the courts
An immigration judge denied Gerdiukov asylum June 9. Six days later, a judge denied him bond as a flight risk. The family says it mailed two packets of support letters and sponsor documents to the court; USPS showed them delivered, but the judge said they never arrived.
A federal habeas petition, filed March 24 in the Southern District of Georgia, is still pending. In court filings, ICE has called the men “arriving aliens” who are not entitled to bond hearings — the same argument a federal judge accepted in Makhmudov’s case.
“We are waiting for our BIA decision,” Chertushkina said of the couple’s appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals. “I have my court date in 2028. He lost, so we have appealed, and now we wait.”
Alone in Brooklyn
Chertushkina has not seen her husband in person since February. Her ankle monitor bars her from traveling to Georgia. Requests through Rep. Yvette Clarke and Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand to move him closer to New York have gone nowhere; Clarke’s office was told there were no beds, she said.
She has spent more than $25,000 on lawyers. And she has her own health to manage.
“I also have some difficult medical issues,” she said. “I have some seizures.”
A jail with a record
Folkston, a former federal prison being expanded into the largest ICE detention center in the country, has a long paper trail. ICE’s own review found substandard care directly contributed to the 2024 death of Jaspal Singh there. In July, Venezuelan detainee Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva died on a bus bound for Folkston.
The Department of Homeland Security has rejected the strikers’ claims about conditions. For Chertushkina, the numbers on the video screen are what matter now. Two hundred five. One hundred eighty-four.
“We came here for safety and protection,” she said. “Now we’re fighting to save his life.”
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The abuse is horrofying ! This is inhumane ! I hate this administration..just f n Evil !
We must votr Blue We must vote Blue
OMG this is so terrifying. Spread the word. Vote blue. I just don't know what else to do.