Stress and Seclusion Define Immigrants' Lives
Interviews with immigrants from our region provide insights into how undocumented people in our communities are faring under the Trump Administration.
By Eric Bonds (Columnist), with Aaliyah Anderson and Tabitha Van Doren (Guest Writers)
We assumed that life has become more difficult for our immigrant neighbors under the Trump Administration, but we didn’t understand what this actually meant until we had the opportunity to sit down and speak with undocumented residents in the Fredericksburg area. We have learned that members of our community are living in fear and isolation. Even though major immigration raids haven’t swept our region, local residents’ lives have still been upended by federal policies of aggressive immigration enforcement and mass deportation.
With the help of Virginia Organizing, we met with five individuals from three different families with mixed immigration statuses, meaning that some members of these families have citizenship, while others do not. Two of these families live in Spotsylvania County, and one family resides in Stafford.
The undocumented residents we spoke to have all lived in our region for more than 20 years and are raising children in our community. We are using aliases here to protect their anonymity.
Gabriela
One community member we spoke with, Gabriela, is a DACA recipient. This Obama-era program gave “Dreamers,” or young people who came to this country as very young children, protection from deportation and a work permit. Gabriela has had DACA status for more than a decade, but it must be regularly renewed, something that has never been a problem before. It usually takes one or two months. Under the current Trump Administration, the process took eight months. During this time, Gabriela was in a legal limbo.
Without DACA protection, she reports that she shut herself in her house, afraid that she would be at risk of being detained and separated from her husband and three children. Gabriela said that, during this time, “I just stayed home. I was having anxiety… like your anxiety levels go south very quickly.” She explained to her children not to open the door if anyone knocks, fearing that any person coming to the house could be an immigration official.
Gabriela’s DACA status was eventually renewed, which has been a relief. But during the delay, her employer had to let her go because she no longer had a legal work permit.
Even with her renewed DACA papers, Gabriela worries because she’s seen stories of immigrants who have been detained despite having legal residency, telling us that, “having a work permit doesn’t guarantee you anything right now.”
Stefani
Another community member that we spoke with, Stefani, also reports secluding herself at home as a strategy to avoid encounters with immigration enforcement. She quit her job in food service to minimize the risk of being apprehended by immigration officials, and she even hesitates to go to the store due to a concern that she might be racially profiled. As a consequence, Stefani reports feeling “like a prisoner in my own home.”
Sometimes the anxiety becomes especially intense. She recounted a story of hearing rumors that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was conducting a raid in her neighborhood one evening. She and her husband stayed awake in the living room throughout the night, keeping vigil and praying. Every noise was frightening.
Though the rumors proved to be false, the intense stress that members of our immigrant community are living with is very real. Two of the families we spoke with know individuals in their personal networks who have been deported. This creates a daily worry about other family members that can’t stay home, but who must put themselves at risk by going out to work.
Family
Though the importance and love of family was a consistent theme in our conversations, our respondents all reported that family outings and large family gatherings had come to an end. One person, Jessi, told us that, “family birthday parties, family cookouts. None of that is really possible. We aren’t able to enjoy none of that. Just the fact that even outside your cookout, ICE could just do a raid right there.”
Similarly, Gabriela described how “we used to go to baseball games, and that we used to go with my daughter sometimes. And now, we don’t go. Gatherings and places that we used to go to before, we’re not doing it.”
Likewise, Stefani mentioned that,
We didn’t get to go out to vacation at all this summer. Usually every summer, we do go out as a family. That’s what we look forward to, like going to the beach or at least camping. It was different this year because I couldn’t go out at all, you know, because there’s so many [immigration] checkpoints. You don’t know where there’s checkpoints.
Most heartbreakingly, two of the parents we spoke to no longer feel safe taking their young children to playgrounds or parks. Gabriela discussed how,
Since this Administration, I don’t think we have been to a park… We just stay home. And that’s very sad… But it’s just kind of like my automatic instinct, like now we are not going to public places. And I think that’s how a lot of families are in the mode of not going to public places.
Perseverance and Hope
As U.S. citizens, we’ve paid attention to aspects of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy as it’s been reported in the national news, typically in coverage of dramatic immigration raids in major cities like DC, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This, we realized, left us with a false sense of comfort, the feeling that “at least it’s not happening here.”
After having conversations with undocumented persons in our own community, we realize how wrong that attitude is. Families are suffering in the Fredericksburg region because of federal policies on mass deportation.
But our conversations also taught us that our immigrant neighbors are persevering and looking for signs of hope. They are watching to see how our community responds to this dangerous moment. While we here at a local level cannot alter national immigration policy, acts of solidarity and support can uplift spirits and could help make vulnerable members of our community feel a little more safe at home.
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Eric Bonds is a sociology professor at the University of Mary Washington. Aaliyah Anderson is a UMW student originally from Chesterfield County, majoring in both English: creative writing and American studies. Tabitha Van Doren is a Stafford High School graduate who is majoring in sociology at UMW.
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