Moral Injury and the Latine Immigrant Community
In my previous post, I discussed the psychological violence being imposed on the Latine immigrant community through the implementation of new and insidious immigration policies under the current administration. Since that publication, this violence has intensified in both scale and visibility. Across many regions of the United States, the public has witnessed large-scale ICE raids in neighborhoods, workplaces, hospitals, school events, and even outside immigration courts, where individuals and entire families are apprehended as they exit mandatory hearings.
Video footage—widely circulated—shows ICE agents forcibly separating screaming mothers from their children, breaking car windows to extract individuals while their families watch, and chasing and tackling street vendors or day laborers as though they were dangerous criminals. These events are highly visible, and their public nature has amplified fear well beyond the sites of the raids themselves.
Adding to the terror is the well-documented reality that U.S. citizens of Latine descent have repeatedly been swept up in raids or individually targeted. As a result, many Latine individuals—including members of my own household—now question their safety each time they leave home. I have insisted that my family carry passports or Real IDs at all times and keep copies of these documents in our vehicles out of fear of being erroneously detained at a raid or checkpoint. In other words, like many Latine people living in areas with a heavy ICE presence, I fear that we will be racially profiled and targeted at best—and falsely arrested, detained, or even illegally deported at worst.
Taken together, these experiences reflect that for many in the immigrant........
