People Being Taken Off The Streets By Armed Men In Masks:
The post came up on my Facebook. A link for a GoFund me to help the family that was in the news. The father was taken and a 6 year old left alone. Just left. As a mother, this was unimaginable to me. I have two daughters and all of this feels surreal, it doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that would happen. I watch the news, read the online articles and wonder what if anything I can do. The reality is that even if I had a bunch of money readily available that would not fix this. I have no grandiose ideas of what could help. I go to work daily to serve my community. I have to make dinner every night, take care of my household responsibilities, what could I do to impact this awful situation?
I write this as a witness, not as a bystander. I’m a subject matter expert. A doctorate level clinician with 25 years of experience serving in this community. I’m here to highlight the catastrophic failure this ICE endeavor is and will be for generations to come. What isn’t in the budget for the DHS is the long-term cost this will be for all of us. This is a debt we will never be able to repay. This will haunt us. Staying silent and normalizing what we are all experiencing is not the answer.
To see the damage just take a look at the comments of most social media posts about ICE or even the go fund me post set up for these families or victims of ICE to see the impact this is already having.
The Mental Health Debt:
What we are living through feels awful. Like a stain, as if we are stained from watching the news clips or the social media. It feels sometimes like we are over extended and asked to hold more. Leaving us feeling indebted.
This feeling of helplessness, I know is terrible to have for a long period of time and yet this situation with ICE feels like it’s just getting started. According to the Department of Homeland Security there will be billions of dollars allocated to this. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/big-budget-act-creates-deportation-industrial-complex This will be a cash cow for many private prison companies. Taking people away will be lucrative and is not going to stop. This terrible wrong will take generations to begin to heal. Like we have seen in history, with the Emancipation Proclamation era 1863-1865, Frederick Douglas continued to write about the debt of slavery which still continues today. https://www.loc.gov/collections/frederick-douglass-papers/about-this-collection/The Mexican Repatriation Act of 1929-1936 where an estimated 400,000+ Mexican Americans most of whom were citizens were forcibly repatriated. https://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-repatriationThe Termination Policy of Native Americans from 1940-1960 where Native people were stripped of their communities, land, and legal identity. https://americanindian.si.edu/explore/repatriationOur national debt is already at its peak, adding more with these raids harms all of us. Harms our mental, spiritual, physical health. It harms our communities, children, future generations, and businesses. It deprives us of healing and leaves us all in states of fear and uncertainty. https://americanhistory.si.edu/becoming-us/belonging/hidden-histories
2026 The Social Death –
What does it mean to be illegal? When you suddenly find yourself without any legal status. Socially erased from a community you grew up in. When you are afraid to take the bus to school because you don’t know if your parents will be taken away. You don’t know if ICE will board the school bus but or come to your classroom. You have a legal entry card, an assigned alien number, permission to be here until you have a court hearing but now you are in constant fear. What if you didn’t do anything wrong, merely exist? Now you’re scared to leave the house or have armed men at your door. This is the reality for many of our neighbors and people working in our communities. If you think this does not affect us all collectively think again. If you think your young children don’t know what’s going on, their answers will surprise you. What are we teaching and modeling to the next generation?
Mandatory Reporter
How long will our state continue to allow these raids in our communities when the harm it is causing is costing us the erosion of trust in our systems. It’s not just about the amount of therapy we will need after all of this. It’s about betrayal and broken trust. How can I as a mental health worker trust the very system that is causing harm to children and families. What hotline can I call for help or intervention for these situations when the very systems in place can’t be trusted. This paradox is the cruelest part of this. So many teachers, nurses, social workers, counselors, lawyers, no longer know how to help. No longer have the same trusts in our systems. We all witnessed children in cages, people who are not criminals taken, people lost once they enter detention centers, deaths in detention, mistreatment, and unarmed people peacefully protesting dying.
Resistance:
Self care as a form of resistance seems like another strange paradox. But it’s important. This situation with ICE and deportations is going to be with us for the next few years. Self care is fundamental to ensuring you, your family, and community make it through intact. I hear from my patients the frustrations they feel with our current situation but not knowing what they can do. They still have families who depend on them, don’t want to risk their jobs, don’t want to be deported, or get into trouble. With these conversations, I always encourage them to begin with self care, practice patience, humility, and kindness. It’s the best way to build hope and to model to yourself your values. Kindness is the highest currency in heaven, it matters greatly here as well.
Love yourself. Love your family, pets, neighbors, trees, whatever may call to you feeling and expressing love is powerful. It allows you to connect to higher forms of connection like empathy and compassion. Love has a transformative power. The more we engage with it, the better it is for our mental health.
For those that can do so, gather with friends, family, colleagues, and build up your support network. Just sharing in conversations together can bring you an abundance of meaning and reflection. Practice listening more. Prayer, meditation, or silent contemplation can reveal a lot to us so using this as a form of self care can be very beneficial. Monitor your stress levels, sleep more, eat better, focus on cardiovascular health. Get your check ups, remember during the pandemic the number of heart attacks and strokes were stress induced.
Revisit history. None of this is new. Take time to read through different eras of history and civilization to understand deeper context. It allows for learning and even better to understand how we overcame it. Despite the current times, we as human beings are drawn to stories of resilience and overcoming. They are what draw us to the movies, bring tears to our eyes, keep us rooting for the underdog.
It validates our struggle and our innate drive for self preservation. In the end, our human empathy will override. Tony Morrison said it best in her speech at the Harvard Divinity school https://youtu.be/PJmVpYZnKTU?si=WF0gxH7zgKLnvRq-, where she described being “bad” is easy, theatrical, lazy. Being good, well that’s interesting. It requires an abundance of inner work. Goodness doesn’t need a whole theatrical presentation, guns, guards, militia. It’s not a coward with a gun who shoots an unarmed person. Goodness doesn’t need a prize or recognition, it is imbued with patience. It acts. Please read some of the works by Tony Morrison for a deeper understanding of our human complexity. Language as the measure of our lives, was something she wrote about. Your indignation with our current lives and events is a beautiful sign of your goodness. Nurture it.
“I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land yields of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim has no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.” Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye.
Helpful resources:
https://www.instagram.com/radio_cosecha/?hl=en
https://www.njaij.org/