United States | News & Politics

Children, including the very young, have been spending weeks or months in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in a remote part of Texas where outside monitors have heard accounts of shortages of clean drinking water, chronic sleep deprivation and kids struggling for hygiene supplies and prompt medical attention, as revealed in a stark new court filing.

Legal experts able to witness conditions made a barrage of allegations about deprivations, violations of legally agreed basic detention standards and humanitarian concerns at the only known Ice center currently holding families. At the facility in Dilley, a small town an hour south-west of San Antonio, kids and their parents described a “prison-like environment” where the guards reportedly call them “inmates” despite them not being criminals, and said they live in “cell-like trailers”.