After the discovery of inhumane living conditions at a south Texas temporary detention facility made headlines last week, the United States Department of Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has moved to relocate upwards of 300 detained migrant children to other sites. 

The Associated Press reported last week that while lawyers with the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of California, Davis inspected the facility to assess the detention conditions at the site, they discovered children caring for other children, children who had not bathed in days, inadequate food provisions, and a collection of other standard of living violations.

Holly Cooper, co-director of the University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic, told the AP, “In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity."

According to the AP, the government allows for the children to be held by the Border Patrol for no longer than 72 hours, after which they must be transferred into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Five immigrant children have died since late last year at CBP facilities.

The development comes amid a contentious political debate over whether CBP's detention facilities constitute "concentration camps." New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term to describe the facilities during an Instagram live stream on June 17th while arguing that the camps "brutalized" migrants with "dehumanizing conditions, " according to Newsweek. Describing the controversial use of the term, Ocasio-Cortez added, "Kids are dying and I'm not here to make people feel comfortable about that."

Merriam-Webster defines a "concentration camp" as "a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.”

Representative Ocasio-Cortez's remarks follow news that the federal government had begun using sites used previously as Japanese-American internment camps during World War II to house migrant children detainees.