LOS ANGELES — A federal judge has ordered a mediator to move swiftly to improve health and sanitation at Border Patrol facilities in Texas, where observers reported migrant children were subject to filthy conditions that imperiled their health.

Judge Dolly M. Gee of the Central District of California asked late on Friday that an independent monitor, whom she appointed last year, ensure that conditions in detention centers are promptly addressed. She set a deadline of July 12 for the government to report on what it has accomplished “post haste” to remedy them.

“We are hoping we can act expeditiously to resolve the conditions for children in Border Patrol custody,” said Holly Cooper, part of a team of lawyers who asked the federal court to intervene.

The lawyers’ reports on conditions at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Tex., where they said children were unable to bathe, were living in filthy clothes and diapers and were often hungry, prompted a public outcry and a new motion asking the court to force the government to move more aggressively to improve accommodations along the border for the thousands of migrants arriving from Central America.

Monitors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General detailed other serious problems with overcrowding at Customs and Border Protection facilities in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.

The new order stopped short of directly ordering the government to take action but referred the issue to the monitor to take action for the “prompt remediation” of conditions at the facilities, included the retention of an independent public health expert.

Government officials have argued that they have responded as best they can to an unexpectedly large surge of new arrivals on the southern border. They disputed the reports from lawyers who visited migrant children at Clint, and said detainees were in fact being held in decent conditions with sufficient food.

But Democratic political leaders have seized on the recent reports in Texas as evidence that the Trump administration has not been sufficiently humane in its response to the overwhelming number of arrivals on the border. On Sunday, Beto O’Rourke, a former El Paso congressman how running for president, scheduled a public “rally for migrant children” in Clint. Another Democratic candidate, Julián Castro, was planning to visit the facility on Saturday.

In her order, Judge Gee said that the court had detailed previous violations by the government of a 1997 consent decree, called the Flores settlement agreement, which established standards for the care of migrant children in its custody. A monitor had been appointed last year over the government’s objections after plaintiffs in the Flores case successfully argued that there had been egregious violations of the agreement.

On Thursday, lawyers filed a request for a temporary restraining order, saying that the government had run afoul of Flores standards at the Customs and Border Protection facilities in the El Paso and Rio Grande Valley areas of Texas.

“The parties need not use divining tools to extrapolate from those orders what does or does not constitute noncompliance,” the judge wrote in her three-page order. “The Court has made that clear.”

The “emergent” nature of the recent reports “demands immediate action,” the judge added.

The ruling was the second edict out of the California courts directed at the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Earlier Friday, a federal judge in Oakland permanently blocked the government from using $2.5 billion in contested funding to build barriers along the southwestern border.

The motion for a temporary restraining order asked the court to mandate immediate inspection of facilities in McAllen, Clint and Weslaco, all in Texas, by a public health expert. It also requested that medical professionals obtain access to those facilities and that the government speed up the release of children detained at the facility to sponsors — mainly parents or relatives in the United States.

“With each passing day, more hospitalizations are occurring and more lives are at risk. Immediate judicial intervention is necessary to compel immediate compliance with the agreement, end this health and welfare crisis, and prevent more illness and child deaths at the border,” the motion said.

The motion included declarations from children and adolescent mothers saying they were not provided enough food and clean clothes.

The conditions under which children are being held “could be compared to torture facilities,” Dolly Lucio Sevier, a pediatrician who visited the Clint facility, said in her declaration. “That is, extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”

Lawyers for the government were not immediately available for comment, but Dan Kowalski, an immigration lawyer in Colorado who is editor of Bender’s Immigration Bulletin, a journal for advocates and academics, said the court case was a significant step in alleviating harmful conditions for migrant children on the border.

“Improving conditions is essential and overdue,” he said. “The larger question is why detain at all? Detention does not deter migration, and only causes needless suffering.”

Manny Fernandez contributed reporting from Houston.

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