Kalina M. Brabeck

The Impact of Detention and Deportation on Latino Immigrant Children and Families: A Quantitative Exploration

Children of Latino immigrants, many of whom live in “mixed-status” families, are a rapidly growing group in the United States. It is widely accepted that their development is affected by multiple and complex factors, including those in their distal context (e.g., laws, institutions, policies). Despite the enormity of the deportation system and its vigorous implementation in recent years, little research has investigated how this particular component of the distal context affects Latino immigrant families. The present survey was designed to statistically explore the impact of detention/deportation on Latino immigrant parents and children (N = 132). Regression analyses indicated that (1) parents with higher levels of legal vulnerability report a greater impact of detention/ deportation on the family environment (parent emotional well-being, ability to provide financially, and relationships with their children) and children’s well-being (child’s emotional well-being and academic performance) and (2) parents’ legal vulnerability and the impact of detention/deportation on the family predict outcomes for children. Implications for practice and policy are discussed.

Framing immigration to and deportation from the United States: Guatemalan and Salvadoran families make meaning of their experiences

The United States (US) deportation system and its recent applications have profound implications for the integrity and well-being of immigrant families. Since harsh policies were adopted in 1996, millions of non-citizens, mostly from Mexico and Central America, have been forced to leave the US. Despite the large numbers of people directly threatened by the deportation system, little is known about how it affects Central American immigrant children and families. A participatory action research project was designed in collaboration with local immigrant organizations to (1) document the impact of deportation policy on Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrant families and (2) collaboratively develop services and advocacy that reflect local constructions of needs and strengths within these families. This paper reports analyses of interviews with 18 families; interviews explored participants’ experiences and meaning-making of detention, deportation, and other forces that threaten their families. Analyses of interviews demonstrate how participants construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the significance of current risks posed by the US deportation system; how these risks intersect with other threats to families, including poverty, state-sponsored violence, and previous migrations; and participants’ responses to these risks. Implications for sustaining collaborative relationships toward enhancing human service work, community organizing, and redressing injustices are discussed.

Race Murder and Community Trauma: Psychoanalysis and Ethnography in Exploring the Impact of the Killing of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas

INTRODUCTION For the past decade the first author has worked in three small communities in Texas where conflicts related to race have been salient. In Anson, Texas, he explored the impact of a post Jim Crow reality on a community that had been entirely white prior to the Civil Rights Era but was now over a third minority, mostly Latino. In Hempstead, Texas he studied the effects of a school desegregation process that had erased all traces of the local historically African American school, leaving enormous conflict and resentment among African Americans with respect to the local education system. More recently, for the past two-and-ahalf years the authors have been working in Jasper, Texas, exploring the impact of the murder of James Byrd on that community. The methodological basis for the work in all three of these communities has been a psychoanalytic ethnographic approach. That is, this work has drawn significantly from both disciplines to frame an understanding of the work and the processes observed, as well as using them as a methodological guide in approaching these communities and those who live within them. Psychoanalysis is a set of concepts and assumptions about how the mind works, but these concepts can also be a resource for our attempts to understand community conflicts and group processes. For example, in Anson, Texas, the first author used a psychoanalytic understanding of symptoms and their function as symbolic reference points to underlying conflicts, tensions, and anxieties, in order to formulate the conscious and unconscious dimensions of a community conflict (drawing equally, however, from the work of Clifford Geertz and symbolic interactionism, notwithstanding his sharp reservations about psychoanalysis). In Hempstead, he used psychoanalytic theorizing about repression and the power of experiences that are excommunicated from consciousness to understand the legacy of school desegregation. Similarly, he employed a psychoanalytic understanding of the restorative function of making what was once unconscious conscious, that is, reintegrating into the public memory crucial elements of a largely disavowed or heretofore unspeakable history. In Jasper, we are using the psychoanalytic understanding of trauma, as well as the psychodynamics of defense, to understand how a community has managed to absorb a profoundly disturbing racial murder. Psychoanalysis is also a framework that defines a particular kind of engagement, and hence, a particular kind of method. When analysts attempt to take their work beyond the consulting room, they have a great deal to learn from anthropology, given that anthropologists have a long tradition of working with the tensions and ambiguities inherent in field work. However, both disciplines work with the ambiguities of transference and countertransference manifestations and the complexities of establishing and maintaining working alliances, that is to say, the management of the psychodynamics of the interpersonal field. Both disciplines also require the practitioners to reflect on what it means to be entrusted with highly sensitive or confidential information. Of special importance is the fact that both disciplines share a similar sensibility, one that trusts the “material” to be guided by the lives engaged and to evolve in meaningful and unanticipated ways that can be grasped, understood. Both also require vigilance against the imposition of predigested frameworks and understandings, even if not always successful in their efforts to ward off such. All three of these communities have been entered with a notable uncertainty about what it is that would be found in them, yet that ambiguity has not been unsettling. On the contrary, it is quite familiar, being the

The influence of immigrant parent legal status on U.S.-born children's academic abilities: The moderating effects of social service use

ABSTRACT The present study investigated the relationship between immigrant parent legal status and academic performance among U.S.-born children, ages 7–10. Building on previous research and a social ecological framework, the study further explored how social service use moderates the relationship between parent legal status and academic performance. Participants included 178 low-income, urban parent/child dyads; all parents were immigrants from Mexico, Central America, or the Dominican Republic and all children were U.S.-born citizens. Using a standardized academic assessment as the outcome, parent legal vulnerability was a significant negative predictor of childrens academic performance on reading, spelling, and math subtests. Additionally, parent use of social services significantly and positively moderated the relationship between parent legal vulnerability and childrens word reading and spelling skills, indicating that social service use can serve as a protective buffer against the negative associations between parental unauthorized status and child achievement.

Integration of unaccompanied migrant youth in the United States: a call for research

ABSTRACT Between October 2013 and July 2016, over 156,000 children travelling without their guardians were apprehended at the U.S.–Mexico border and transferred to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). During that same period, ORR placed over 123,000 unaccompanied migrant youth – predominantly from Central America – with a parent or other adult sponsor residing in the U.S. Following placement, local communities are tasked with integrating migrant youth, many of whom experience pre- and in-transit migration traumas, family separation, limited/interrupted schooling, and unauthorised legal status, placing them at heightened risk for psychological distress, academic disengagement, maltreatment, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, fewer than 10% of young people receive formal post-release services (PRS). This paper addresses the paucity of research on the experiences of the 90% of children and youth without access to PRS. To bridge this gap, this article: (a) describes the post-release experiences of unaccompanied youth, focusing on legal, family, health, and educational contexts; (b) identifies methodological and ethical challenges and solutions in conducting research with this population of young people and their families; and (c) proposes research to identify structural challenges to the provision of services and to inform best practices in support of unaccompanied youth. [196 words]

Ethical Ambiguities in Participatory Action Research With Unauthorized Migrants

There is increased recognition of the importance of well-designed scholarship on how immigration status and policies impact migrants in the United States, including those who are unauthorized. Some researchers have looked to community-based and participatory methods to develop trust, place migrants’ voices at the forefront, and engage collaboratively in using research as a tool for social change. This article reviews three ethical ambiguities that emerged in the process of a series of participatory action research (PAR) projects with migrants in the United States, many of whom were unauthorized. Specifically, three themes are discussed: (a) the tension between the human desire to respond to injustices, and the challenges of doing so in ways that recognize one’s privilege and power as an outsider and supports the migrants’ agency and autonomy; (b) the complex definition, explanation, and dimensions of “risk”; and (c) the complexity of using a methodology (PAR) that prioritizes participants’ collective identity and community in the context of regulations that are designed primarily to protect individuals.

Authorized and Unauthorized Immigrant Parents The Impact of Legal Vulnerability on Family Contexts

This study explores the social-ecological contexts of unauthorized immigrant families and their U.S.-born children, through examining how otherwise similarly low-income, urban, Latino immigrant families differ on the basis of the parents’ legal status and interactions with the immigration system. Drawing on social-ecological theory, variations based on parents’ legal vulnerability among exosystem-level experiences (e.g., parents’ occupational stress, discrimination experiences) and microsystem-level experiences (e.g., parents’ mental health, parenting stress) were explored. Structured interviews were conducted with 178 families with an immigrant parent from Mexico, Central America, and Dominican Republic, and a child (aged 7-10 years) born in the United States. Unauthorized parents reported statistically higher occupational stress, ethnicity-based discrimination, challenges learning English, immigration challenges, and legal status challenges, and lower use of social services, when compared with authorized parents. The groups did not differ on microsystem factors (e.g., parent mental health, and parenting, marital, and family stress).

Charting Directions for Research on Immigrant Children Affected by Undocumented Status

Three groups of children from Mexico and Central America are vulnerable to effects of U.S. immigration policies: (1) foreign-born children who entered the United States with undocumented immigrant parents; (2) unaccompanied children who entered the United States alone; and (3) U.S.-born citizen-children of undocumented immigrant parents. Despite the recent demographic growth of these youth, scholarship on their strengths and challenges is under-theorized and isolated within specific disciplines. Hence, service providers, researchers, and policymakers have insufficient research to inform their efforts to support the children’s well-being. A group of scholars and service providers with expertise in immigrant children convened to establish consensus areas and identify gaps in knowledge of undocumented, unaccompanied, and citizen-children of undocumented immigrant parents. The primary goal was to establish a research agenda that increases interdisciplinary collaborations, informs clinical practice, and influences policies. This report summarizes key issues and recommendations that emerged from the meeting.

Suicidality among immigrants: Application of the interpersonal-psychological theory

ABSTRACT Immigrants constitute a significant percentage of the total population living in the United States; however, there is a paucity of research unique to suicidality among immigrants. The present article examines the applicability of the three variables of the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior—acquired capability for suicide, sense of thwarted belongingness, and perceived burdensomeness—to conceptualize, assess, and treat suicidality among immigrants. Risk and protective factors and mechanisms are discussed in the context of 2 case studies and immigrant paradox. Clinical implications include assessment and treatment of immigrant-specific experiences. Obstacles to treatment and future research directions are presented.