Every morning, immigrant women wake in frigid detainment facilities, lodging with 20 other women in a single cell.

Like clockwork, guards arrive to deliver only four or five sanitary napkins to accommodate all of them, and if a detainee is older or injured, it's unlikely that she's able to scramble to the door in time to claim a pad. Consequently, she's forced to wear the same, single sanitary napkin for the duration of her period. Efforts to stifle the blood flow with tissue prove ineffective as guards are reluctant to offer the women toilet paper when needed. Then, she, her pants and her underwear, become soaked in menstrual blood.

"Used toilet paper and sanitary napkins accumulated in a pile ... and a putrid stench thus enveloped the cell," said Alba Quiñones Flores, who fled her native El Salvador to escape domestic abuse before being picked up near Falfurrias, and experienced sitting in her own menstrual blood during detention.

Quiñones, a former Customs and Border Protection detainee, is now seeking asylum and has filed a lawsuit against CBP in federal court due to the inhumane treatment that she was made to suffer. Quiñones is among the first former detainees to sue the agency for maltreatment. However, she is not the first to complain about poor treatment.

The American Immigration Council obtained more than 800 complaints of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse lodged by detainees between January 2009 and January 2012 and found that 97 percent of complaints resulted in no punishment. More than 80 percent of child detainees claimed receiving inadequate food and water and half reported verbal abuse, while 1 in 4 reported physical abuse, ranging from sexual assault to punching, kicking and use of stress positions as punishment.

Quiñones claimed that the CBP held her for an unspecified number of days; provided her and other prisoners water that "smelled like bleach, had a foul taste, and burned" when it was swallowed; made prisoners go to the bathroom while everyone watched; were only given toilet paper when prisoners begged; and refused to distribute food to her because she was unable to walk over to the distribution station due to an ankle injury.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities are overcrowded, and cells don't provide mattresses, blankets or any form of bedding, according to numerous detainees. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants move through CBP detainment each year, and while an internal CBP directive from 2008 indicates that "Whenever possible, a detainee should not be held for more than 12 hours," they are almost always held for longer.

CBP's role is to host suspected immigrants for a very short amount of time before handing them over to ICE. However, conservative-prompted detention quotas and a decrease in the number of ICE detection centers have turned CBP outposts into warehouses to "backlog" thousands of undocumented immigrants. There, in those facilities, prisoners reside in freezing cells called hielera (Spanish for "icebox"), which are so cold that fingers turn blue and lips crack.

CBP sets all guidelines for detainee treatment internally, and those standards aren't a matter of federal law. Some of CBP's standards include timely access to medical attention and prescriptions and access to drinking water, soap, toilet paper, sanitary napkins, and clean bedding. However, there is no oversight process to make sure that CBP facilities are in compliance with their own internal standards.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., introduced separate bills to create federal standards for the treatment of detainees in CBP and ICE facilities. Boxer stated in a press release last December, "No human being held by United States authorities should ever be exposed to hunger, extreme temperatures, physical or verbal abuse, or denial of medical care."

The call for the humane treatment comes at a time when thousands of immigrants, including children, are forced to endure callous treatment, which includes rigid temperatures and the denial of food and toiletries. Like most immigration legislation, neither bill has a very good chance of passing Congress.

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