Part of the Series
After the Raid
The US government terrorizes immigrant families and families of color with thousands of raids each year. These raids are, by design, militarized, terrifying, violent and dehumanizing. In their wake, individuals may experience symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and community trust in government services of all sorts is severed.
Now that President Trump has declared that any of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US are appropriate targets for removal, entire immigrant communities are being affected by a drastic uptick in interior immigration enforcement efforts. This intensification in anti-immigrant policing affects not only undocumented people but also the families and communities to which they are connected.
In this series, After the Raid: The Communal Trauma of Immigration Enforcement, activists, researchers, lawyers, community members and physicians come together to reflect on how these practices of immigration enforcement affect the health and well-being of immigrant families and communities in the US.
Collectively, we describe an immigration enforcement system that relies on racial profiling for its daily functions and exists to maintain a racist status quo. We describe the way in which the constant surveillance of mixed-status communities turns them into geographies of routinized fear and collective trauma, damaging the mental health of both community members and the activists who work to combat this surveillance.
As public health scholars, we were inspired to curate this special series for Truthout after conducting research that documented the specific PTSD symptoms experienced by family members of all ages after a raid on an apartment in a small Midwestern town in the winter of 2013. Our research, published in the Journal of Traumatology, discovered that the survivors of the raid experienced nightmares and waking physical symptoms that align with PTSD diagnostic criteria. “My body and skin would go cold,” said one survivor of the raid, describing the bodily sensations that continued to sweep over her at the sight of law enforcement.
Not everyone is arrested in a raid, but it is likely that all 11 million undocumented immigrants and the families to which they are connected fear this violence. Not everyone develops PTSD, but as others have pointed out, a growing number of those fearful of deportation are avoiding medical care, health and social services, and police and emergency services— all of which impacts their health and that of their families. Even as the targets of this violence live their daily lives amid violent persecution, however, they are nonetheless finding creative and resilient avenues of resistance.
We hope this series ignites a deeper understanding of immigration enforcement — including the range of impacts that ripple throughout families and communities — and encourages researchers, advocates and community members to collaborate, protect one another and fight for positive change.
Click here to read the stories in this series.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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