“I took nine pills in the morning and seven in the evening. I don’t know what medications I was taking; no one ever told me,” one child recounted.

Even before the Trump administration took the dramatic and punitive step of separating migrant children from their parents in April, some 10,000 undocumented kids were already languishing in federal custody for an average of eight months. They’re housed in shelters scattered around the country, operated by dozens of private companies funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Many of the shelters have poor track records — documented histories of neglect, sexual and physical abuse — but one in particular distinguished itself in the minds of the children who were detained there: the Shiloh Treatment Center in Manvel, Texas.

On Monday, a federal judge ordered the government to remove most of the children from Shiloh, and told the Trump administration the shelters must end the practice of prescribing powerful psychotropic drugs without a court order or a parent’s permission.

Kids who stayed at Shiloh told their lawyers and family members they were heavily drugged, in some cases held down and injected, and abused by staff members. (One of the doctors prescribing those drugs, Dr. Javier Ruíz-Nazario, lost his certification years before, the Center for Investigative Reporting recently discovered.)

“I took nine pills in the morning and seven in the evening. I don’t know what medications I was taking; no one ever told me,” one child who was detained at Shiloh told lawyers. Those pills were in addition to injections staff members also allegedly used to control behavior. “They would come and give me a shot to tranquilize me… I would start to feel sleepy and heavy, and like I didn’t have any strength. I would sleep for three to four hours and then wake up and slowly start to feel my strength return.”

That child — who has bounced between six shelters in three states since arriving from Mexico in 2014 — was just one of a number of children who recounted horror stories about Shiloh to the lawyers responsible for ensuring that the government is providing a humane environment for the kids in its custody.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-administration-drugging-kids-704431/