Lately… there’s been an elephant in the room.
One that feels impossible to ignore,
even if a lot of people would rather look away.
And before I say anything else, I want to say this clearly.
Deportations didn’t start with Trump.
Obama deported millions.
Other presidents did too.
That truth matters.
But it’s not the whole truth.
What feels different now isn’t just the policy.
It’s the posture.
The violence.
The racial profiling.
The tactics that feel less like law enforcement
and more like intimidation.
Fear isn’t a side effect anymore.
It feels intentional.
It feels weaponized.
And fear—when it lingers long enough—
stops being a feeling
and starts becoming a condition.
I’ve noticed it in my body.
The tight chest.
The shallow breathing.
That constant scanning of my surroundings
I thought I’d outgrown.
Watching what’s happening right now
has triggered something I can only describe as PTSD.
I’ve been racially profiled by law enforcement
more times than I can count.
I’ve been questioned about my legality in the U.S.
despite being born in Miami.
Those moments don’t disappear with time.
Trauma doesn’t live neatly in memory.
It lives in the nervous system.
The body remembers
even when the mind tries to convince itself it’s fine.
Psychology calls this hypervigilance—
when your body stays alert for danger
even when there’s no immediate threat.
So when I see what’s happening now,
something old wakes up in me.
Not politically.
Physically.
For more than six years, Mexico has been home.
And lately, I’ve felt the pull to go back.
To family.
To familiarity.
To the place that shaped me.
But there’s another feeling that rises just as fast.
Fear.
The kind that makes you hesitate
before booking a flight.
The kind that runs scenarios
you don’t want to imagine.
What if I’m targeted?
What if something happens while I’m with my wife and my daughter—
both Mexican?
What if a normal moment
turns into a nightmare?
Just sitting with that
has brought tears to my eyes.
And what scares me most
is how reasonable those fears feel.
Psychology calls this anticipatory trauma.
It’s when the nervous system reacts
not to what has happened,
but to what might.
The mind rehearses loss
before it ever arrives.
And here’s the part we don’t talk about enough.
What’s happening right now
isn’t just about immigration or enforcement.
It’s about what happens to a society
when fear becomes ambient.
When threat isn’t an event—
but a climate.
Chronic fear changes people.
It keeps the body in survival mode.
Stress stays elevated.
Patience shortens.
Empathy thins out.
When the brain is stuck in survival,
everything becomes binary.
Us versus them.
Safe versus dangerous.
Control versus chaos.
This doesn’t just affect immigrants.
It affects everyone.
Parents carry it home.
Kids absorb it before they understand it.
Communities grow tense.
People stop trusting each other.
And here’s the quiet truth
the government doesn’t measure
and doesn’t seem to care about:
You can’t terrorize part of a population
without destabilizing the whole.
Fear doesn’t stay contained.
This kind of enforcement
doesn’t just remove people—
it erodes trust.
Trust in institutions.
Trust in systems.
Trust in the idea
that you’ll be seen as human
before you’re seen as a problem.
When trust breaks, people withdraw.
They stop reporting crimes.
They stop asking for help.
They stop participating.
That’s not security.
That’s social decay.
There’s grief here too.
Real grief.
Grief for families torn apart.
Grief for the country people believed in.
Grief for the idea
that home should feel safe.
When grief isn’t processed,
it doesn’t disappear.
It turns into anger.
Or numbness.
Or hopelessness.
When leadership reduces people
to numbers, optics, and talking points,
it sends a devastating message:
Your pain doesn’t count.
Your fear is acceptable.
Your humanity is negotiable.
That message doesn’t just land on immigrants.
It lands on anyone
who has ever felt othered,
targeted,
or disposable.
Which is why so many people right now—
even those who aren’t directly affected—
feel exhausted.
On edge.
Emotionally fried.
This is collective trauma
forming in real time.
And trauma doesn’t ask for papers.
It doesn’t care about citizenship.
It moves through nervous systems,
families,
and generations.
What’s hardest to sit with
is knowing none of this is accidental.
Fear is effective.
Fear distracts.
Fear divides.
But fear also leaves scars.
Scars policies don’t account for.
Scars that don’t show up in reports.
And one day—
whether acknowledged or not—
we’ll all be paying the psychological bill.
Still…
despite everything… both fear and faith force you to believe in something you can't see…
and I refuse to believe fear gets the final word.
Psychology reminds us
that connection matters.
That meaning matters.
That shared humanity
is one of the strongest buffers
against trauma.
Healing doesn’t start with control.
It starts with connection.
And that brings me back
to something older than politics.
Older than borders.
We are brothers and sisters.
Not metaphorically.
Biologically.
Human beings are wired for connection.
Our survival has always depended
on cooperation—
not domination.
To love your neighbor
isn’t just a moral idea.
It’s a psychological necessity.
These are hard and uncertain times.
But we still get to choose
who we are inside them.
We get to choose empathy over fear.
Humanity over hatred.
We get to believe—
quietly but stubbornly—
that we the people
will stand our ground
and not let fear dictate our future.
That belief doesn’t erase the pain.
But it keeps us human.
And sometimes…
that’s how resistance begins.
————
Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association. Mental Health Disparities: Diverse Populations. American Psychiatric Association, 2017.
Aranda, Elizabeth, et al. “The Effects of Immigration Enforcement on the Mental Health of U.S. Citizens in Mixed-Status Families.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 55, no. 4, 2014, pp. 440–456.
Brewin, Chris R., et al. “Risk Factors for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Trauma-Exposed Adults.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, vol. 68, no. 5, 2000, pp. 748–766.
Haslam, Nick. “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 10, no. 3, 2006, pp. 252–264.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 1992.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.