Lawsuit alleges improper medication of migrant children in federal shelters
BROWNSVILLE, Texas_After crossing into the U.S. last year to join her mother in Houston, a 16-year-old Honduran girl was placed at a shelter for immigrants where, she said, she was given drugs for anxiety and depression.
The medication, she said, "makes me feel dizzy and sometimes makes it hard to concentrate.... Sometimes I have no desire to do anything. I just want to be with my mother."
Advocates have filed a lawsuit charging that the 16-year-old and more than 30 others - some as young as 11 - are representative of thousands of children housed in federally contracted immigrant shelters who can be medicated without parental or judicial consent. Some, they say, are forcibly
