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This week, I’ve been working as part of a team of lawyers and doctors monitoring conditions in border facilities, including in Clint. What we found has left me devastated. buff.ly/2FnKmKx 
Children should spend no more than a few hours in short-term border jails and US-law limits their detention under typical circumstances to 72 hours, but many of the children we interviewed at Clint had been there for three or four weeks.
The Border Patrol claims that high numbers of border arrivals are causing these delays as they wait for space to open up in the somewhat more child-friendly detention centers and shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement at US Health and Human Services.
Based on our interviews, officials seem to be making no effort to release children to caregivers – and many have parents in the US – rather than holding them for weeks in overcrowded cells sometimes sleeping on hard floors.
Nearly all of the children I spoke with had been held without any communication from desperate parents.
Meanwhile, a public health emergency is brewing. While we were denied access to speak with children quarantined in special cells for those with flu, several infants held in South Texas facilities were admitted recently to a hospital, after the intervention of doctors and lawyers.
Children at Clint told us they don’t have regular access to showers or clean clothes, with some saying they hadn’t been allowed to bathe over periods of weeks and don’t have regular access to soap.
The US government argued in court on Tuesday that its obligation to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions does not require it to provide kids with hygiene items such as soap or toothbrushes. courthousenews.com/feds-tell-9th-…
Many of the kids in the Clint facility are too young to wash or feed themselves, yet they are left to fend for themselves with the help of unrelated older children.
Congress should urgently investigate and take action to stop these unconscionable abuses, such as requiring immigration agencies to release these children as soon as possible to their family members.
