A Texas mother has been charged with child abandonment after taking her 12-year-old daughter out of school to care for her baby brother full-time in a filthy hotel room on a diet of cheeseburgers.

Ashli Rene Lock, 37, is accused of leaving her two young children in a “filthy hotel from for an extended period of time”, according to court documents.

The authorities said “both children appeared malnourished and filthy” and that the one-year-old was “sleeping in a soiled diaper”.

The young girl told the police that her mother had taken her out of school to “care for her one-year-old brother full-time”.

The 12-year-old girl also said that her mother did not provide them with enough food so she “feeds him mac and cheese”, adding that she had not left the hotel room in about a month.

The girl said her mother sometimes came to the room from work, sometimes not.

She told officers that her mother did not leave a contact number with her in case of an emergency, and showed “photographs of injuries that she said came from the defendant striking her”.

The police described the hotel room as “a Marvin Zindler inspired nightmare of unsanitary living conditions, with broken bottles on the floor, drugs in plain view, slime in the refrigerator and mouldy food haphazardly strewn throughout”.

It is unclear why the defendant left her children alone for such long periods of time and the investigation is ongoing.