A lawyer is calling on international leaders to speak out against the US government's treatment of migrant children.
US law professor and child advocate Warren Binford has visited children who are being detained in a US Customs and Border Facility in Clint, Texas.
She tells Susie Ferguson children she saw were sick, filthy and crying - and it was heart-breaking.
We did not expect so many children there. We did not expect them to be so young, so sick, so dirty, so hungry. We did not expect them to be sleeping on the cement. We did not expect them to have been kept there for so long. 1/8
— Warren Binford (@childrightsprof) June 30, 2019
"First thing we saw when we arrived was a roster that was provided to us by Border Patrol, and that roster listed over 350 children in this facility, which was shocking to us," she says.
"Border patrol stations in the United States are notoriously inhumane, filthy places, and in fact there is a US law that prohibits the government from having the children there for more than a few hours, 72 hours maximum.
"And what we found is that when we scanned more closely, that a significant number of these children were young children. These included infants, toddlers, pre-schoolers, school-aged children, over 100 of them. And then when we looked even more closely we saw that there were about a half a dozen child mothers, trying to care for their infants in this facility.
"We really started to panic because we had never seen so many children there for such young ages. So we immediately asked the guards to start bringing us the children who had been there, the youngest, the longest, we wanted to see the youngest children, and the child mothers.
"And when this population of children started to be brought to us, we were even more upset because they walked in and they were sick and they were filthy. They were crying, they were falling asleep in the middle of the interviews, and they started telling us stories that were absolutely horrendous.
"We heard about young children, including infants and toddlers who were being forced to sleep on concrete floors, cement blocks. We heard about not having access to soap and showers, toothpaste and toothbrushes.
"We heard about children being separated from their families, including sometimes their parents and siblings, entire family units that were broken apart at the border.
"We started to hear how hungry the children were and how inhumane some of the children were being treated by some of the guards. We also learned, as the day started to unfold, that there were approximately 100 children or more, who were being kept in a warehouse on the property, on the compound.
"This facility was not even on our radar screen because it was a relatively small facility that ... had an occupancy maximum 104 adults.
"So we didn't know where they were putting all of these 350-plus children and we drove around the outside of the property afterwards, and all we could find was a warehouse that was largely windowless, and that appear to be where they were keeping a significant number of children. We have a congressional delegation going in tomorrow, and the Border Patrol is lying to the congressional members, saying no children have been kept in that warehouse for over a month. So basically we have a major cover-up going on," she says.
