Kids sleeping on the ground with lights on at all hours, day and night. Teen moms lacking sufficient drinking water and struggling to breastfeed their babies. Infants drinking from dirty bottles. No access to handwashing; sometimes, no showers for weeks.
These are some of the conditions at the Border Patrol’s Ursula detention center in McAllen, as detailed by Brownsville pediatrician Dolly Lucio Sevier. On June 15, Lucio Sevier accompanied attorneys who were visiting Ursula as part of a larger look at whether the U.S. government may be violating the law by keeping kids in unsanitary temporary detention facilities for longer than 72 hours, amid an unprecedented number of migrant families and kids arriving at the border. Last week, an Associated Press report on horrific conditions at the Clint facility outside El Paso led to an outcry from the public and elected officials, but reports from other facilities indicate this is not an isolated problem. Spokespeople from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which oversees Border Patrol, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a medical report first obtained by ABC News, Lucio Sevier wrote that the conditions in Ursula, the largest CBP processing facility in the country, “could be compared to torture facilities,” citing “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water or adequate food.” Some kids she met had already been in custody for weeks; all showed evidence of trauma. Meanwhile, the lack of basic sanitation “is tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease,” Lucio Sevier wrote. “I question whether there are appropriate infection control measures in any of the CBP Processing Centers, and thus question whether this is an appropriate space to be holding any infants and children.” She added: “It is obvious that the dignity and well-being of children is not even an afterthought in the design of the center.”
