Why Amber became an activist

US actress Amber Heard, a UN human rights champion, said on Monday her childhood in Texas near the Mexican border helped spark her activism.

Her father, a Texas construction worker, accrued more and more godchildren on the Mexican side of the border, and young Amber considered many of them as friends and family.

Going home in his pickup truck, there was an “indelible impression left on my soul”, a recognition of injustice for children on the Mexican side.

“Simply due to where I was born, a few miles north of this line, I was free to travel back and forth as I saw fit,” she told an audience at the United Nations in Geneva on Monday.