Immigration Enforcement and Latine/x Families

In this episode, host Rose Campbell speaks with UCLA social welfare scholar Dr. Tatiana Londoño about the psychological and social toll of immigration enforcement on Latine/x immigrant communities in the United States. Drawing on both her personal experience as a Colombian immigrant and her years of research, Londoño explains how immigration policies, from the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform Act to post-9/11 security measures and more recent ICE expansions, have created a climate of chronic fear for many immigrant families. This climate of fear discourages families from accessing healthcare, schools, and other social services, creating long-term consequences for children’s well-being. In the midst of these numerous challenges, Londoño emphasizes the resilience of immigrant communities and the importance of local advocacy and mutual aid networks. She encourages listeners to support community-based immigrant organizations, believe and validate the fears expressed by affected communities, and resist the normalization of policies and practices that produce widespread trauma.

Tatiano Londoño is an Associate Professor of Social Welfare at UCLA. She is a first-generation Latina born in Colombia and raised in Miami, Florida. Throughout her career, she has received funding from various sources such as OLLI NOVA Diversity Scholarship, St. David’s Foundation, Integrated Behavioral Health Scholars Program, and QuestBridge. Her work explores how Latine/x immigrant youth and families navigate and adapt to the psychosocial consequences of migration and resettlement. Her work is published in numerous academic journals including Family Process, The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Health Psychology, Journal of Adolescent Research, American Journal of Health Behavior, and Social Work in Mental Health. 

Transcript

Narrator 0:11

Welcome to the History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

Rose Campbell 0:39

Welcome to the History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work. I'm Rose Campbell, Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy, which hosts this podcast. The ICE raids throughout the U.S. have rocked communities to their foundations, as masked agents harass, detain, and even kidnap individuals who are supposedly either violent criminals or in the U.S. illegally. While evidence is mounting that many of these individuals do not even have a criminal record, much less a violent one, and many are not only legally in the US, but some are even citizens and green card holders. The raids continue across the country, even if they've been replaced in the news cycle by other stories recently. For the individuals and families affected by these raids, however, the trauma is long-lasting. Even before President Trump's assault on immigrants, Latina immigrants in particular face enormous challenges, not only in immigrating to the United States, but in accessing important services like health care. These ongoing challenges take their toll on immigrant families as well as those who provide these services for immigrants in a climate of increasing danger and instability. Joining me today in this challenging landscape is Dr. Tatiana Londono. Dr. London is a first-generation Latina born in Colombia and is currently an assistant professor of social welfare right here at UCLA. Her work considers the mental health and psychosocial well-being of Latine/x immigrant youth and their families, and specifically the experiences and impact of immigration. Tatiana, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. So let's start with a little bit of background. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to study the trauma experienced by Latine/x immigrants specifically to the United States?

Tatiana Londono 2:41

Well, first, yeah, thank you so much for having me. I think this is a topic that for me I hold really close to my heart, both personally and professionally. As you mentioned, I was born in Colombia and I immigrated to the US as a child. So I carry with me the experience of navigating a new country, a new language, a new culture, all while trying to figure out really who I am, right? At a very young age. And that experience of being in between two worlds, of missing and trying to retain that culture of a place that I loved, being Colombia, and trying to belong to a place that doesn't always welcome, um, doesn't always welcome immigrants, doesn't always welcome children, that never really leaves you. Um, so as I got older and went into social work and research, I kept coming back to these questions of what does that experience really do to you? What does it do to your children? What does it do to your family's sense of belonging and safety in this world? And so my academic path has really brought me to focus specifically, right, on this mental health, on the psychosocial, really what that means is psychological and social well-being, which is a fancy way of thinking of how do people function, how do they cope, how do they find meaning and connection in the context of such chronic and ongoing stress and uncertainty? And as Latine, Latinex immigrant families face a very particular set of stressors that I don't think, I don't think gets nearly enough attention in either policy or clinical settings. So that's where I've really planted myself, and that's where I really intend to keep going in this work. So you mentioned that you immigrated as a child. How what changes have you seen in federal policies on immigration over the past few decades? So this is a very important question because I think a lot of people assume that we're seeing this right now is it is completely new. And in some ways, right, the scale and the rhetoric are pretty new, but this type of aggressive immigration enforcement has been building up for a very long time. Now, I'm not a historian, but I do have to understand history in order to continue doing this work. So if you think back, right, back to the 1990s, we started to see a significant, a significant pardoning, right, of immigration enforcement during that time. There was the illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act of 1996, which dramatically expanded who could be deported and created these new mandatory detention requirements. And then after September 11th, you saw another massive expansion of what I perceive as surveillance and aggressive enforcement with the creation of ICE. We often forget that ICE was recently created, really in just 2003, and that the merging of immigration enforcement with this new national security rhetoric. And that framing, right, of the immigrant as this potential threat has never gone away since then. And so for Latin Latinx immigrants specifically, this is really, really significant because of both the demographic reality in the US. Latinos make up the largest group of the undocumented population in the US, and also the racial dynamics at play here in the US. I don't believe that enforcement has ever been race neutral, race neutral. So when we talk about who gets stopped, who gets questioned, who gets detained, we know that the data consistently shows that Latino communities are typically the ones that bear that disproportionate burden. And there's terms that researchers use, such as, you know, Leisy Abrego here at UCLA use this term, legal consciousness, right? And what that means is the awareness that the law does not protect you equally. And many Latina Latinx immigrants, regardless of their documentation status, carry that consciousness in their bodies every single day. So what changed under Obama, and this surprised many people, was actually a record number of deportations. Though once again, it was a stated focus on people with criminal records under Obama. So what changed under Trump's first term is that priority prior prioritization of people with criminal records really changed. It wasn't just folks with criminal records. The administration introduced sweeping measures like the travel ban, right, that was targeting Muslim-majority countries, moved to DACA protections for Dreamers who had grown up in this country, entirely grown up in this country, and deployed ICE in ways that made even legal permanent residents vulnerable to detention and removal proceedings. And these raids swept up people with no criminal history, and that chilling effect spread fear to everyone, to all mixed status families, to families with US citizen children, to families who face to have parents who were facing deportation. So now in the second term, we're seeing something even more expansive and quite frankly more destabilizing, as we've seen. So for instance, he talked about stripping birthright citizenship from children born on US soil. And that's a right that's protected by the 14th Amendment and carried out deportation flights that bypassed completely standard due process protections. Like many attorneys that I talk to all the time, due process does not exist right now. And there have been documented cases of US citizens of legal residents being detained or caught up in enforcement actions. And the rhetoric from our senior officials in the US has increasingly framed immigration enforcement not as this targeted legal process, but as this broader national security imperative, one that treats just the presence of someone that's not born in the US, regardless of their legal status, as a threat to our national security. And that is a problem, a huge problem.

Rose Campbell 8:40

Yeah. So we've kind of started at a broad with a broad view. Let's zoom in a little bit and talk about some of your previous work, which you've alluded to a little bit already. But your your previous work focused on the effects of immigration enforcement on U.S. citizen children of undocumented Mexican parents specifically. So can you tell us a little bit more about your findings and the climate before the current Trump administration with that specific group of people?

Tatiana Londono 9:10

Yeah. And I do want to first say this work that I think about constantly right now, because we're watching the conditions that I studied previously become even dramatically more severe. So this work is still relevant, right? Despite it have been in the past, I'm forgetting now, what, 10 years ago at this point, maybe. But what the research, both mine and others, consistently shows is that children do not need to personally experience, right, a raid or a deportation to be profoundly affected by the threat of it. What we call fear of deportation or fear of any immigration enforcement, that ambient, that chronic anxiety that a parent could be taken away at any moment has measurable effects on children's mental health, on their educational well-being, on their attachment and their sense of safety, right? In their, even in their home. And these are often US citizen children, and they do have the same legal rights as any child born in this country. And yet their psychological reality is shaped by their family's vulnerability. We also see what researchers call a chilling effect, right, on service use, which I do mention quite a number of times in my work. So families withdraw from healthcare, from schools, from social services, not because they don't need those services, but because any interaction with an institution feels like a potential exposure, right? A potential threat. And that withdrawal has real health consequences. But I want to be clear that this is not only about US citizen children, despite the fact that some of my previous work has focused on that. My work has also brought me into direct contact with asylum-seeking children and asylum-seeking families, people who came to this country attempting to go through legal channels, fleeing gang violence, political violence, political persecution, domestic violence, often from Central American countries, where that violence has deep roots in US foreign policy and US intervention. And so these are families who did everything they were told to do. They presented themselves at the border, they filed their claims, they waited, and yet they too are living in this profound limbo in our country, detained or under threat of detention, uncertain whether they will be allowed to stay, separated in some cases from their children. And those children matter. You know, their trauma is real and it is measurable. And they pres and they represent something foundational about what this country has historically stood for. A nation that has at its best offered refuge to people with nowhere else to turn. And that is changing. Before this administration, you could point to certain protections, right? DACA gave some breathing room to a specific population of young people. There were sanctuary policies in many cities, including our own here in LA, and states that created at least some buffer. And there was, I think, a general sense among families that while the system was hostile, while the system is imperfect, there were some limits. And what has changed in the second Trump term is the removal of these limits, both in the in terms of what those actual limits look like, but also what they're perceived as. And so though this rescission of protection, the expansion of enforcement into these previously protected spaces like schools, like churches, hospitals, just the use of imagery and rhetoric that is dehumanizing for immigrants, all of this has produced this level of fear that I would describe as acute traumatic stress at the community level. Asylum pathways that families once relied on have been completely gutted or blocked entirely, leaving people who came here legally or who attempted to come here legally with absolutely no clear road forward and absolutely no safe road back, right? So we're not talking about this chronic background anxiety that may have existed before. Now we're talking about families, and I'm talking about citizen and non-citizen, documented and undocumented, long-settled and also newly arrived, who are not sleeping, who are making contingency plans for where their children will go if they are taken, who are afraid to drive or to go to the grocery store. And so what I think this is, is this a public health emergency. And I think it is one that falls heaviest, in my opinion, on children who have absolutely no say in any of this.

Rose Campbell 13:56

So speaking of all of these services that people are withdrawing from, a lot of your current work considers not just these families, but also the institutions and individuals who provide support to these immigrants and their families. So can you tell us a little bit more about your current project with these service providers and what you've learned?

Tatiana Londono 14:16

Yeah. And so I think this is a dimension of the work that is um, I think, under discussed. And I'm really glad you're asking about it. Um so first I want to I want to explain the logic of what brought me to this work, which I think is fairly simple, right? If families are withdrawing from services out of fear, and if at the same time the people who provide those services are also experiencing fear, confusion, moral distress, then we see that the entire infrastructure of support is under stress at the same time. And that's a very dangerous situation. So what I'm finding across, I did um 82 interviews, right, with frontline workers, attorneys, case managers, social workers, community health workers in California, Texas, and New Mexico is that service providers are experiencing what I would describe a combination of burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and this other term that we often don't talk about, moral injury. And moral injury, what that means is it's what happens when you are forced to act in ways that violate your own deeply held values or witness such actions and feel completely powerless to intervene. And so these are people who came to this work because they believe in human in human dignity, right, and social justice. And often the service providers that I spoke to describe feeling professionally useless, um, especially the attorneys, right, as traditional legal tools became completely unreliable. And as I've mentioned before, due process is currently non-existent. So providers are measuring burnout at clinically significant levels across my study with reported, you know, physical symptoms such as panic attacks, significant weight loss, flares of chronic illness. I had multiple providers ask if it was okay to cry during the interview. And I'm also finding that providers who are themselves immigrants or people of color, they carry this dual burden. They don't escape the fear at home and they don't escape it at work. Um, for instance, undocumented community liaisons are avoiding the very community spaces that are central to their outreach. So their work is literally an outreach and they are fearful of going to those spaces. We have former asylum seekers describe the current climate as re-experiencing the trauma that brought them there. And these are service providers, right, that are now advocating for those that were in similar situations as them, and now they're being re triggered in that work. And then I also have to mention the organizational layer. We have seen federal funding freezes that have caused mass layoffs, right, in these organizations. Partner organizations are closing, and multiple organizations anticipated a collapse this year in 2026. So I will be doing follow-up interviews to understand a little more deeply what that repercussion will look like. But the practical result is that case managers, social workers, all these service providers cannot connect clients to services that no longer exist, even when even when the clients are willing to seek help. I also really want to point out some protective factors because they do matter for us to think about solutions, right? So the single strong strongest buffer against burnout was clear work-home separation. Basically, providers who maintained boundaries reported better outcomes. So this can look like dedicated self-care time, peer support structures, reflective supervision in their organization. But you can imagine who gets the privilege of having that? Who gets the privilege of being able to set those boundaries, right? Um, and so something I also found particularly meaningful is that immigrant identifying providers, those who identify as immigrants and are doing this work, they describe that they're extending their care beyond the workplace. So they're doing policy advocacy, they're doing community organizing, they're doing community patrolling. And what's interesting is that actually reduced their moral injury rather than adding to it. So taking action outside of the constraints of their role, their institutional role, gave them a sense of usefulness that the job itself could no longer provide. So alongside with that, right, they also have grounding practices rooted in culture, rooted in community, such as connecting with land, with nature, prayer, planting. One provider talked about walking barefoot, right? Feeling the earth, feeling that connection to land. And these are named, right, as these genuine sources of refueling their cup, so to speak. Not just how they serve clients, but how they sustain the people doing that work is really, really critical. So basically, you have this terrible convergence, right? Communities in acute fear, withdrawing from support systems, but also support systems themselves under stress and uncertainty. And that's the gap I'm trying to document, but also ultimately find ways to address, right? Through these protected mechanisms that I've talked about.

Rose Campbell 20:10

So, in this sort of tornado of trauma, if you will, what do you think the future looks like for immigration policy and enforcement? And how is this going to affect Latine/x immigrants moving forward? Is it going to get better? Is it going to get worse? Do we have no idea? What do you think?

Tatiana Londono 20:27

Yeah, it's a really tough question. And I'm going to be honest with you. Um I don't think anyone can predict with confidence what the next year looks like, um, let alone longer term. Um, the pace of policy change, of hypothetical policy change, has been deliberately destabilizing, in my opinion. Um, I think that instability is intentional because chronic uncertainty, if you think about it, in itself is a form of control. So, what I can say is that the research on community trauma is very clear that the effects of this period will not end when the political moment ends. And I know that's devastating to hear, but it's true. So we know from studying other periods of mass enforcement, the deportations of the 1930s, Operation Wetback in the 1950s, the raids of the 2000s, the psychological and social wounds will persist, persist across generations. Children who are experiencing this right now will carry it with them. Communities that have withdrawn from institutions will not automatically re-engage with those institutions, even if they say it's safe again. Because we know that trust, once it's broken, takes a very long time to rebuild. At the same time, though, I'm also seeing extraordinary resilience. We're seeing it in the community. Um, with with within Latin Latinx communities, they've always faced enormous adversity and have always found ways to care for each other, to organize, to persist. In Spanish, we say, solo el pueblo salva el pueblo, right? The community saves themselves. And we're seeing the mutual aid networks, the legal defense funds, the rapid response groups, the community-based grassroots organizations. They are working right now under very, very difficult conditions. And that is also part of the story. And I think it's important that we hold both of those things at once.

Rose Campbell 22:45

Yeah, it's good to be reminded of the resilience as well and how much these communities have already overcome. So, on that note, are there any final thoughts or advice that you'd like to leave with our listeners about this topic?

Tatiana Londono 23:00

Yes, definitely. I'll say a few things. Um, if you haven't noticed, I don't know how to be concise or brief. Um I want to I want to speak particularly to those who are not directly affected communities, but who care, right? And want to know what to do. First, I think it's really important to believe people when they tell you that they are afraid. I think sometimes well-meaning people want to reassure. They want to say it won't be as bad as you think, or you'll be okay. And I want to ask people to resist that impulse. Um, the fear is rational, it's based on real condition conditions, and the most powerful thing you can do first is to simply witness it without minimizing it. So that's the very first thing. Second, the most effective advocacy happens locally. Sometimes big change feels overwhelming, and actually the biggest change you can make is in your community. The organizations doing the hardest work right now are community-based, as I've mentioned before. Immigrant rights organization, legal aid, community-based grassroots organizations. They need volunteers, they need funding, they need people willing to show up. So if you want to take action, find your local immigrant rights coalition. Ask them what they need. And I want to be specific about what that local action can look like because my research has shown that there are forms of protection that don't always get named in these conversations. So communities are organizing rapid response networks, systems where neighbors alert each other when enforcement is in the area. They are doing community patrolling, they are running know your rights trainings in churches and schools, in workplaces. They're building mutual aid structures that when a family member is detained, the people around them don't disappear. And these are acts of community care that have real protective effects. And there are things anyone can participate in or help resource, such as such as you, such as you, you and I, we can do that. Um, and third, for those of you who work in any kind of service or institutional setting, such as healthcare, education, social services, legal aid, I think it's really important to take the time to understand what is your actual legal obligation and what protections your institutions can offer. I think there's a lot of misinformation. I didn't even talk about that today, but there's a that's a whole other conversation, right? There's a lot of misinformation circulating right now. And some of the chilling effect that I described earlier is being driven by fear of consequences that may not actually be legally grounded. So I think it's really important to also know your rights and know the rights of the people you serve with the caveat that we know that due process is currently you know not stable. Um, and finally, I want to say that as a researcher, but also just a person, I really do not want, I want to ask people to not let this become normalized. It's really easy to become complacent and to also just see this as normal. The raids, the detentions, the separation of families, these are not routine administrative functions. This should not be happening. And they are the infliction of trauma on human beings. Keep calling it what it is and keep demanding that the people around you call it what it is, too. I think that language really matters, bearing witness matters. And I think in the long arc of history, it is the people who refuse to look away who actually make change possible. So that is my last bit of advice.

Rose Campbell 27:04

Well, thank you. This is such an important topic and sobering, but also with the possibility of resiliency and hope. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Tatiana Londono 27:13

Thank you so much, Rose.

Rose Campbell 27:15

Thank you also to our audience for listening in. If you enjoy our podcast, please make sure that you like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And newly announced, don't forget to check us out on TikTok. We are, you can find us at UCLA History Policy for short summaries of every new podcast episode. Thank you for listening.

Narrator 27:44

Thank you for listening to the History Politics Podcast, Putting the Past to Work from UCLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, lutzkincenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichman. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.