Inside the nondescript gray buildings of the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Ramon Mendoza Pascual wears a navy blue uniform, rather than an orange one, to signify that he is not a criminal convict—unlike some other inmates at the center.

Mendoza Pascual, a carpenter, used to work installing doors and windows in Seattle, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, which profiled him in April after he led a hunger strike at the facility. The detention center has been harshly criticized for the "shocking" conditions inside its walls.

Outside the prison for the past seven days, his wife, Veronica Noriega, has been on her own hunger strike. "Physically, I feel okay," she told me last Friday, through a translator over the phone. "I have not eaten. I have been drinking water. I don’t actually feel any kind of pain."

"I’m doing this," Noriega explained, "because I want people to be aware of what’s happening at the Northwest Detention Center and I want to build up pressure so that my husband is set free." They have three daughters together.

So why is Mendoza Pascual locked up? He was arrested by immigration agents and locked away at the detention center in September 2013, after being charged with a DUI, The Guardian reports. But when the charge was dropped, Mendoza Pascual remained in jail, awaiting a deportation hearing which takes place this afternoon.

"If the facts as reported [in The Guardian] are all there is, then no, this is not someone who should be deported," Congressman Adam Smith (D-9) told me in an interview last week.

Conditions inside the Tacoma jail—which is run by the GEO Corporation, a private prison company that has admitted immigration reform could harm profit margins—were so poor that in March, Mendoza Pascual began a hunger strike that garnered national and international attention. GEO guards repeatedly threw him and other hunger strikers in solitary confinement, prompting an outcry. According to activists, Mendoza Pascual went without food for more than 50 days.

After the hunger strike, Smith introduced a bill to strengthen oversight over private prison companies like GEO.

Mendoza Pascual's deportation hearing in Tacoma begins at 1 p.m. today. Last week, President Obama announced he would delay long-promised executive action to potentially change his deportation-heavy approach to immigrant enforcement—deportations have no observable effect on crime rates, according to a new study—until after November elections, infuriating immigrants and their supporters.

This evening, after Noriega learns whether her husband will be sent back to Mexico—he fled the country, she says, because "he was being persecuted by criminals"—she intends to end her hunger strike.