Yave Begnet

Immigration Raids Have Long-lasting Effects on Children of Migrants

Let me introduce myself. I’m an immigration attorney and I blog as yave begnet at Citizen Orange. I’ve been given the opportunity to guest post here on the subject of immigration law and policy. Via Man Eegee, I read today an article by Anna Gorman at the LA Times about the consequences of immigration raids on children of immigrants.

Yesenia Rangel, 12, looked out her window on a Friday morning in February and saw several officers with the letters "ICE" on their sleeves. Yesenia immediately called her neighbors to warn them that immigration officers were outside their Compton apartment building. Then she watched in tears as officers handcuffed her father and took him away. During the three weeks he was detained, Yesenia said, her schoolwork suffered and she could barely sleep. "I thought, 'I'm never going to see my dad again,' " said Yesenia, a U.S. citizen by birth. As federal authorities expand immigration enforcement in California and throughout the nation, teachers, mental health professionals and immigrant rights advocates are raising concerns about the effect on children like Yesenia who are U.S. citizens.

A comprehensive report (pdf) from the Urban Institute and NCLR released last year detailed some of the effects mentioned in the article.

After the arrest or disappearance of their parents, children experienced feelings of abandonment and showed symptoms of emotional trauma, psychological duress, and mental health problems. Many lacked stability in child care and supervision. Families continued hiding and feared arrest if they ventured outside, increasing social isolation over time. Immigrant communities faced the fear of future raids, backlash from nonimmigrants, and the stigma of being labeled “illegal.” The combination of fear, isolation, and economic hardship induced mental health problems such as depression, separation anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal thoughts. However, due to cultural reasons, fear of possible consequences in asking for assistance, and barriers to accessing services, few affected immigrants sought mental health care for themselves or their children.

You know your world is twisted when you can read a sentence like this next one without batting an eye (from the LA Times article):

[ICE] also issued a memo directing agents not to take children into custody if they are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents and instead try to coordinate care with child welfare authorities.

Which implies that until recently, it was official government policy to lock up U.S. citizen children in certain circumstances, if only temporarily. I hope I’m not the only one who sees something wrong with this. The fact that we’re locking up children at all strains belief. Once you label a child born in the U.S. an “anchor baby” and question the child’s right to constitutional protections that emerged from the Civil War and have common law roots going back centuries, it’s easy enough to justify incarcerating U.S. citizen children who’ve committed no crime. Contra Malkin, let’s not go back to the era of concentration camps for citizens of disfavored ethnicities. (I sometimes wonder what restrictionists envision when they talk about anchor babies. Maybe something like this.) From the LA Times again:

Marlies Amarca, a clinical psychologist in the San Fernando Valley who has testified as an expert witness in Immigration Court, said she frequently sees children whose parents have been arrested by immigration authorities. The children often have nightmares and separation anxiety and frequently fall behind in school, she said. "It's a very scary situation," she said. "It has an effect on their school performance. It has an effect on their psyche."

Roberto Lovato has argued persuasively that the trauma inflicted on children by immigration raids are just one part of a system of control and exploitation that he terms “Juan Crow.”

[T]he younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white–and black–children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos’ subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants. Listening to the effects of Juan Crow on immigrants and citizens like Mancha (”I can’t sleep sometimes because of nightmares,” she says. “My arms still twitch. I see ICE agents and men in uniform, and it still scares me”) reminds me of the trauma I heard among the men, women and children controlled and exploited by state violence in wartime El Salvador. Juan Crow has roots in the US South, but it stirs traumas bred in the hemispheric South.

Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, I’ll work on producing shorter posts!

Yave Begnet: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 6:52 AM, Jun 10, 2008 in Immigration
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