Why more people should be talking about ‘immigration trauma’
- El Timpano
- Jul 31, 2025
- 6 min read
August 1, 2025
Welcome to El Tímpano’s Weekly Dispatch. I’m Erica Hellerstein, senior immigration, labor and economics reporter.
In 2011, Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga saw a perplexing case in her counseling practice. The social worker, who was offering free services to Latino families in the Bay Area, took on a 10-year-old client who was struggling with acute stomach pains. The girl, a Spanish speaker, had seen numerous doctors, none of whom could detect a medical issue. They believed her pain was psychological and suggested the family seek therapy.
When Hernandez-Arriaga met with the girl, she found a student who was thriving in school, had close friends, and came from a loving and supportive family. She struggled to determine the root of the child’s distress until one session, when the girl picked up a pad of paper and drew a mother and baby cat, both with tears running down their faces. Above the mother cat, she wrote: “no papers.” Above the baby cat: “papers.”
“And then she looked at me and said: what is the baby cat gonna do when the mama cat is taken away?” Hernandez-Arriaga recalled. “And in that moment, I realized all the fear, the stress, anxiety that she had been carrying in silence for many years. She was really scared that one day she would go to school and come home and be separated from her family.”
Fast forward more than a decade. Now, Donald Trump sits in the White House, elected for the second time on an anti-immigrant platform. But this time, the administration has shifted its focus away from those attempting to cross the border to those already living within it: people with families, deep roots and years of contribution to their communities. People like the mother of the girl who drew the two sad cats.
When Hernandez-Arriaga met with that little girl, the immigration climate was not what it is today, and yet her body still expressed the terror of living with the looming threat of parental deportation. How many little girls are showing similar symptoms today? In the last few months alone, Trump has signed legislation slashing health care and nutrition assistance from refugees and asylees, while making historic investments in detention and enforcement. The administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, where some detainees say they were tortured, paralyzed parts of Los Angeles with sweeping immigration raids, federalized the National Guard to suppress anti-ICE protests, arrested asylum seekers at court, tapped the Internal Revenue Service for undocumented immigrants’ tax data, terminated legal protections for unaccompanied minors, and all while immigrants in Florida detention centers report serious human rights abuses.
All of this facilitates Trump’s campaign pledge to conduct “the largest deportation operation in American history.” And it is already upending daily life for Bay Area residents in both visible and less obvious ways. Parents are pulling their children from school. Workers are staying home. Mixed-status families are losing access to public benefits. Some are skipping doctor appointments or opting out of safety net programs they are eligible for.
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But it’s also devastating community members’ emotional well-being as they experience heightened levels of anxiety, fear, and stress. As Perla, one of our newsroom’s SMS subscribers in Hayward, shared with us back in January: “I am not the only one feeling scared; my children are also afraid to the point of thinking about going to Mexico or not leaving [the house], fearing that I might be taken away.”
The psychological toll of this distress might not always be visible. But it can manifest in physical ways, like the little girl’s stomach pains. Hernandez-Arriaga described the cumulative impacts of the fear that immigrant families and their loved ones are experiencing as a distinct form of trauma, which she describes as “immigration trauma.”
“There’s no identifiable trauma related to immigration in our DSM,” she said, referring to the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual that used to diagnose trauma. “But this is clearly a traumatic time. Children across the country are waking up every day with fear. Mothers are going to work not knowing if they’re going to see their child when they get home. Fathers are going out to do construction not knowing if they’re going to be beaten down and deported to another country by ICE. There’s no sugarcoating that the community is in shock.”
Research has long shown that exposure to chronic trauma and stress can take a serious toll on mental and physical health. Children and teens who have had a parent deported or detained expressed higher rates of suicidal ideation, alcohol use, and symptoms of PTSD. Detained youth and adults experienced heightened levels of depression, anxiety, and emotional distress, including thoughts of self-harm.
At the same time, the looming threat of detention and deportation can leave people, especially children, in a state of persistent emotional distress. For children in particular, exposure to prolonged stress—known as toxic stress—can disrupt brain development, interfere with learning, and trigger long-term health and behavioral issues.
Resource of the Week
Fear, stress and anxiety have become part of daily life for many Latino immigrants—emotions that are sometimes unspoken but show up in the body, especially in children like Hernandez-Arriaga’s 10-year-old client. As threats of detention and deportation grow, so does the toll on our communities’ mental health. Our resource guide offers free and low-cost therapy and psychiatric services for Spanish speakers in the East Bay. For those experiencing a mental health crisis, we have a separate guide featuring 24/7 hotlines that provide receive immediate assistance.
Do you know families who could benefit from these events? We’d appreciate if you shared our guide with them and let them know they can text us any questions at (510) 800-8305.
But even in the midst of this fear and uncertainty, some are finding ways to nurture affected communities’ mental health and joy. In addition to the benefits of soccer, which a previous newsletter explored, Hernandez-Arriaga sees opportunities for healing in the cultural arts, especially music and dance traditions that connect immigrant communities with their homelands. She helps run mental health and cultural programs as the executive director of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS), a nonprofit serving the Half Moon Bay Latino farmworker community.
The guiding philosophy is cultura cura, or culture cures. It is rooted in the idea that engaging in sensory experiences like playing music, cooking, and dancing can be a powerful mental health intervention for immigrant communities disconnected from traditional therapeutic models, but eager to reconnect with cultural traditions from home. Research supports this. One study found that music therapy programs can help to reduce farmworkers’ elevated levels of stress, anxiety and depression.
A salient example is ALAS’ weekly accordion class, led by Hernan Hernandez, son of the bassist for Los Tigres del Norte. The class takes place in the evenings, serving farmworkers across Half Moon Bay. The program came together in the wake of the horrific 2023 mass shooting on two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, which left seven farmworkers dead. Last year, I profiled one of the survivors, Pedro, who filed a groundbreaking lawsuit and joined the class during his recovery. As I wrote, he has since become one of its most devoted students, undergoing a profound transformation since becoming critically injured, and losing his older brother, in the attack.
Last week, I stopped by the accordion class once again, while reporting an upcoming radio adaptation of the story. It had been nearly a year since my last visit. Trump hadn’t been elected yet, and the mental health challenges farmworker advocates talked about then—wildfires, the pandemic, the trauma of the shooting—were different. But watching the group practice ten months later, I was struck not just by their improvement, which was dramatic, but also the feeling in the room. It felt like a small but meaningful sanctuary from the pressures and stress of the outside world.
Hernandez-Arriaga described it as a “cocoon of safety,” an oasis where “the community can feel joy through the cultura, where they can be celebrated. That’s what we have to hold onto right now to be able to make it through.”
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and see you next week. Stay tuned for the radio piece about the accordion class this fall!”
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