Diarrhea was rampant, kids were losing weight and parents had to clean dirty clothes in the sink because guards wouldn’t give them clean stuff, mothers at a crowded Texas border facility in Laredo told Department of Homeland Security investigators last month, according to a internal report obtained by The Times.

The crisis at the Laredo facility is detailed in the first of two May memos by the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. The relatively new oversight agency is tasked with reviewing conditions within DHS’ massive detention system. The memos, intended for agency leadership, detailed conditions at many facilities along the southern border this spring.

The second report, also obtained by The Times, details alleged deficiencies in medical care at a detention center in Donna, Texas, where an 8-year-old Panamanian girl was held who later died in border police custody.

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The reports came at a time when the country’s immigration detention system was under intense strain. Arrests at the southern border skyrocketed in the week leading up to the May 11 expiry of Title 42, the public health measure that allowed border agents to quickly return migrants to send. . At one point that week, the agency was holding more than 28,000 migrants in facilities at the border that were well above capacity.

Both documents contain a comment that they reflect the firm’s initial observations and have not been verified and confirmed according to the firm’s usual procedures.

Nearly every mother in Laredo who spoke to the researchers said their children had diarrhea.

Some women noticed that their children hadn’t eaten much or at all, wrote the researchers who visited the facility between May 9 and May 11. Others noted that their children had lost weight.

Some mothers whose children were affected said they believed the diarrhea was due to too much dairy and processed food in the facility.

The investigators told Border Patrol about the detainees’ complaints, and the second report said the diarrhea problem in Laredo had been resolved.

The report also describes overcrowding.

The memo noted that the Laredo facility housed about 2,500 people despite a capacity of less than 1,000 and that some living areas for single men were very cramped, with sleeping mats directly touching other sleeping mats and no room to walk around the mats.

Still, the memo said the facility was airy, open, and clean, and felt calm and orderly.

Homeland Security officials provided general comments about the US immigration detention system, but did not provide on-the-record answers to specific questions about any of the reports The Times got their hands on.

Border patrols have long been under scrutiny. During the Trump administration, the DHS Inspector Generals Office conducted an investigation that found migrants in cramped spaces in several facilities, some of which stood

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room conditions for a week and not having access to showers. The inspectors called it dangerous.

Senior managers at several facilities were concerned about the safety of their officers and the inmates. The situation was described as a ticking time bomb, the report said.

In 2021, as an increase in unaccompanied immigrant children crossing the border led to overcrowding in border patrol facilities, lawyers for the children said conditions were cramped after interviews with them, according to the Associated Press. The lawyers said they could not visit the facilities themselves.

A special monitor that oversees medical care at border facilities said in a January report to a federal court that improvements were being made to medical care within the facilities and health care providers were added in some places. The monitors’ reports are part of a year-long court settlement that requires the government to detain children and families no longer than 72 years

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hours in custody.

The monitor wrote that the care of unaccompanied minors in isolation stations and the regular overcrowding of CBP facilities are the most pervasive threats to compliance with the agreement and to the provision of essential custodial services for children. It also underscores CBP’s responsibility to address overcrowding and reduce its impact on children in custody.

Conditions within border facilities attracted attention after the check

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A year-old girl died in custody on May 17. CBP officials issued a statement saying that a nurse at Harlingen station rejected three or four requests from the girl’s mother to send her to hospital or call an ambulance. The girl’s mother told the Associated Press that: I felt like they didn’t believe me.

Border arrests have dropped in the weeks since Title 42 expired. In early June, DHS said the number of border crossings had dropped by 70

% per cent

of the high arrest figures at the beginning of May.