'Mummy, I want to leave': Sad reality of children in migrant detention centres

Harrowing: An eight-year-old girl and her family at the San Ysidro US-Mexico border crossing in San Diego, California. They are appealing to stay in the US on humanitarian grounds. Photo: EPA

The photograph of the toddler’s T-shirt tells a story. Its grey and white stripes are splattered with large blotches of dried blood, the deep red of the stains clashing with the bright pink of a rose stitched into the left shoulder.

This was the shirt that little Catherine Checas, aged three, was wearing when she started throwing up blood one morning in February. It was an alarming sight, particularly for her mother Gladys Checas, 21, and for the five other people held together in a single room.