At another Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, attorney Toby Gialluca said all the children she talked to last week were very sick with high fevers, coughing and wearing soiled clothes crusted with mucus and dirt after their long trip north.

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"Everyone is sick. Everyone. They're using their clothes to wipe mucus off the children, wipe vomit off the children. Most of the little children are not fully clothed," she said.

Gialluca said migrant teens in McAllen told her they were offered frozen ham sandwiches and rotten food.

At both detention facilities, the children told attorneys that guards instructed girls as young as 8 to care for the babies and toddlers.

State and federal elected officials on Friday demanded change about conditions at Clint, McAllen and other Border Patrol stations. There was plenty of angry fingerpointing as well.

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott slammed Congress as "a group of reprobates" for failing to provide adequate border security funding.

"Every child who is not being taken care of adequately at the border, Congress is an accomplice to any harm they suffer," he said.

Oregon's Senator Jeff Merkley pushed the Department of Homeland Security to publish a remediation plan "to immediately end these abuses."

He gave them a deadline of July 12, tweeting: "Children are being held in appalling and unacceptable conditions. Detained children are being left to care for each other - including, in one case, a two-year-old who was left with no diapers. (at)DHSgov needs to tell us what their plan is to fix this, NOW."

Republican Congressman Will Hurd, whose district includes Clint, said the tragic conditions "further demonstrates the immediate need to reform asylum laws and provide supplemental funding to address the humanitarian crisis at our border."

His Democratic counterpart, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar of El Paso, said she has already asked the Customs and Border Protection commissioner for a "full accounting" of the situation.

Border Patrol stations are designed to hold people for less than three days, but some children held in Clint and McAllen have been in there for weeks. Legally, migrants under 18 should be moved into Office of Refugee Resettlement care within 72 hours.

But federal officials have said they have hit a breaking point. That's in part because over the last year, migrant children have been staying longer in federal custody than in the past, leading to a shortage of beds in facilities designed for longer-term stays.