TACOMA, Wash. — The beef is served red and raw, or not at all. What’s edible comes in small portions, just 2 ounces of protein, often hours past normal mealtimes, according to advocates. Lunch arrives at 5 p.m., dinner at midnight.

And so on Saturday, 140 detainees at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma began their fourth day without food.

The hunger strike marks the 20th time this year that detainees have used one of their few tools of resistance to advocate for better food and medical care at the facility, advocates say. Over 1,450 people are indefinitely detained over immigration cases at the center.

“You have to be in an extraordinary distress to be willing to go that many days without meals,” said U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who arrived at the detention center unannounced Saturday alongside U.S. Rep. Emily Randall, D-Wash., to see the conditions of the facility.

The members of Congress were allowed to tour several housing units and the kitchen, but were denied access to the medical wing or medical staff. Many questions about detainees' health and hunger concerns went unanswered or were obfuscated by officials, the lawmakers said.

The center is run by the GEO Group, a for-profit contractor that operates more than a dozen immigration detention centers across the country. It has faced allegations of inhumane conditions and mistreating the people in its care. In February, staff were sued for assault and sexual abuse in Pierce County. The contractor did not immediately respond Saturday to a request for comment about the hunger strike and lawmakers’ visit.

Dexter and Randall said officials at the facility told them it was not officially a “hunger strike” until nine consecutive meals have gone uneaten. Saturday marked nearly a dozen refused meals, but officials told the lawmakers that some detainees had shared commissary food. Still, facility nurses have urged detainees at the two protesting units to drink water and begin eating again.

The lawmakers were told the kitchen is short four vacant positions, but it has previously been cited for serving food past its best-by date and for having too few medical staff in inspections by Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman.

Organizers for La Resistencia, an advocacy group seeking to shut down the detention center since 2014, estimated an average of 12 hunger strikes annually and said the uptick speaks to the desperation and deteriorating conditions.

The group also held its monthly solidarity protest Saturday. Organizers said roughly 100 people had shown up in support of immigrant rights and closing the facility. Josefina Mora-Cheung, the group's director of organizing, called a detainee on the phone during the rally, amplifying his voice over the microphone. In Spanish, a detainee named Luis explained how the facility placed him in solitary confinement, barring him from going outside to the yard, because he had been communicating with advocates and refusing to eat.

In support, the crowd chanted over the speaker phone, “No están solos,” meaning “you are not alone,” to the beat of cowhide drums.

Ray Ishii, 64, drove from Seattle to support the detainees, in part because his mother had been held at the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho.

“It’s a reminder of what happened in World War II to my parents,” he said, looking over at the low-slung concrete facility behind rows of chain-link fencing, below a hazy blue sky.

“I had hoped that we’d moved on and grown past that,” he said. “But obviously not.”

For Mailari Muñoz, 28, standing outside the detention center gates was a painful memory — the place her family had come over a decade ago to pick up her mother, following nine months in detention. Muñoz was a freshman in high school when her mother was separated from her family.

“It caused a lot of trauma,” she said, recounting how her grades slipped and her mental health declined. “I woke up crying every day just not having my mom.”

“I know the feeling other families are feeling,” Muñoz said, gesturing to the entry gate where two people were somberly walking past the guard booth. What is less visible, she said, is the harm to families in the days and years after an arrest or deportation.

This loss was palpable for H. Lucero, 25, who asked to be identified by her first initial and was visiting her husband on Saturday. Their 1-year-old daughter was asleep in her arms, tiny toddler’s shoes slung over a free finger.

Lucero is from Washington. Her husband was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement two months ago on his way to work as a landscaper. He missed their two-year wedding anniversary and his daughter’s first steps. Now, when the toddler sees her father through the glass, she raises her arms. She doesn’t understand why he can’t hold her.

“It’s hard without him, seeing her grow,” Lucero said. “He misses her more than anything, misses us.”

Each week, Lucero says, though her husband is not among those on hunger strike, she notices him grow thinner.

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