UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (AFP/AP) -- More than 100,000 children are currently being held in migration-related detention in the United States, often in violation of international law, the UN said.
Lead author of the United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, Manfred Nowak, said the figure refers to migrants children currently in custody who reached a U.S. border unaccompanied, as well as those detained with relatives and minors separated from their parents prior to detention.
"The total number currently detained is 103,000," Nowak told AFP, calling it a "conservative" assessment, based on the latest available official data as well as "very reliable" additional sources.
Globally, at least 330,000 children across 80 countries are being held for migration-related reasons, according to the global study that launched Monday, meaning the U.S. accounts for nearly a third of such detentions.
The study in part looked at violations of the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child, which mandates that child detentions be used "only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time."
The U.S. is the only UN member state that has not ratified the convention which took effect in 1990.
But Nowak said that did not absolve President Donald Trump's administration of wrongdoing with respect to the detention of migrant children at the southern border with Mexico.
"Migration-related detention for children can never be considered as a measure of last resort or in the best interest of the child. There are always alternatives available," Nowak told reporters in Geneva.
He added that even though the U.S. has not ratified the child rights convention, it is bound by the convention on civil and political rights, which forbids cruel and inhuman treatment.
"Separating children, as was done by the Trump administration, from their parents, even small children, at the Mexican-U.S. border... constitutes inhuman treatment for both the parent and the children," Nowak said.
"There are still quite a number of children that are separated from their parents, and neither the children know where the parents are nor the parents know where their children are. That is something that should definitely not happen again."
Nowak said the Trump administration did not reply to a questionnaire submitted to member states while the report was being researched.
 
U.S. Prison System Long Plagued

For years, the federal Bureau of Prisons has been plagued by systematic failures, from massive staffing shortages to chronic violence. But the largest agency in the Justice Department has largely stayed out of the public view.
The death of billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein and the revelation that he was able to kill himself while behind bars at one of the most secure jails in America has cast a spotlight on the agency, which has also been besieged by serious misconduct in recent years.
Staffing shortages at the agency — it employs more than 35,000 people and has an annual budget that exceeds $7 billion — are so severe that guards often work overtime day after day or are forced to work mandatory double shifts. Violence leads to regular lockdowns at federal prison compounds across the U.S. And a congressional report released earlier this year found "bad behavior is ignored or covered up on a regular basis.”
At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons will be responsible for carrying out the first federal executions in more than 15 years, the first of which is scheduled for Dec. 9.
The issues at the Bureau of Prisons were likely to take center stage Tuesday as the agency’s new director appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her appearance come as federal prosecutors in New York prepared to charge two correctional officers who were responsible for guarding Epstein when he took his own life in August at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. The city’s medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide.