Following media reports of children being held for weeks in atrocious conditions at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, the government has removed the kids from that facility and taken them to a tent city in El Paso, NBC News reports. Lawyers who visited the detention center in Clint last week reported that children were sleeping on concrete floors, not allowed to shower for weeks at a time, and exposed to outbreaks of flu and lice. Toddlers were handed off to slightly older children to care for, and the babies weren't given changes of clothing. While the children have apparently been moved out of the windowless prefab warehouse where up to 300 were housed at Clint, the Department of Homeland Security source cited in the NBC story didn't indicate whether conditions at the new facility would be substantially different. All hail Trump the Merciful!

The Associated Press detailed the unsanitary, inhumane conditions at the Clint facility in reports last week, after attorneys came forward to speak out about what they saw. The team of attorneys are monitoring whether the government is meeting its legal obligations under the Flores settlement, the court case that set rules for treatment of undocumented minors -- and which the Trump administration has constantly been trying to weasel out of -- and took the unusual step of going to the media because conditions were so horrifying.

One of the attorneys, Warren Binford, told the New Yorker that the Clint facility wasn't even on the team's radar, because it was meant to hold about 100 adults but as of last week was holding more than 300 kids, most in a windowless warehouse. She said teenaged mothers who had small babies had shirts stained with breast milk, and that young children had pants full of excrement -- no diapers. Some kids said they had only showered or brushed their teeth once, following weeks of detention -- and that was only a day or so before the lawyers' visit. She added, "This facility knew last week that we were coming. The government knew three weeks ago that we were coming."

This is where we point out that children are only supposed to be held by the Border Patrol a maximum of 72 hours before being transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for placement with a sponsor -- usually a family member who's already in the USA. But the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the ORR, has slowed its approval of such placements, and its baby jails are already filled to capacity. Which is why the government is opening internment camps on military bases. Also, it doesn't help that ICE is arresting undocumented family members of those who DO apply to sponsor kids.