Panic attacks and anxiety plague a young immigrant mother navigating around ICE arrests
Social media alerted a recent immigrant to Chicago one recent afternoon that federal agents were nearby. The young mother learned they were at a corner she would have to pass to catch her train to work.
“I had a panic attack,” the woman said in Spanish. “I didn’t want to go to work. In fact, I got there late … My husband told me, ‘I'll walk you to the [CTA] and we’ll see if there’s something around there.’”
The corner was clear by the time they arrived, and she later learned it was only Chicago police. But the woman was deeply shaken.
She has a pending asylum case and fears she could be picked up by federal agents and separated from her husband and their young daughter. The Chicago Sun-Times is not naming her because she has an uncommon first name that could identify her and put her at risk.
The family is expected in front of an immigration judge in October. She fears what should be a routine court hearing could end in their deportation back to Venezuela.
The woman is now staying off social media and only watches TV news as President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign intensifies in the Chicago area. She and her husband continue to do their own errands — at night when there tends to be less reports of ICE sightings. And when her husband goes to work, delivering food across the city, she frequently checks in with him.
“I don’t have any peace,” she says. “... I’m thinking of him, I’m thinking of my daughter and I’m thinking of all the scenarios that could happen.”
Mental health experts say this kind of fear can have ripple effects, disrupting sleep and leading to changes in a person’s mood.
“What folks are living through truly is a trauma — this threat of forcible separation from attachment figures and caregivers,” said Rebecca Ford-Paz, a child psychologist based in Chicago who is part of the Coalition for Immigrant Mental Health.
The Venezuelan woman worries most about her daughter, especially if she and her husband were to be detained while the girl is at school. As her mom talks, the young girl lays on a bed in the family’s studio apartment, singing softly along to YouTube videos.
Children can develop stomach aches or headaches when facing this kind of anxiety. Living with constant threat can harm their development, Ford-Paz says. They may have trouble paying attention, struggle making decisions and may have difficulty relaxing.
So far, the woman doesn’t see any changes in her daughter’s mood or behavior. But she knows the young girl is starting to pick up on the family’s precarious situation. The girl has asked her mom if “immigration” is the reason why they can’t go to the park.
“Sometimes she does cry,” the woman says. “She tells me she wants to return to her country, that she misses her family.”
The woman took part in a mental health support group for migrants when she was living at a shelter in Chicago. She keeps in touch with some women she met, but she says their community is small.
“I would like it if this country gave me the opportunity to remain here peacefully, to work in a way that helps the country’s economic growth,” the woman says.
For now, she’s trying to figure out how the family can exercise since they spend so much time indoors. And she continues going to work even when she feels scared.
“With faith in God that nothing will happen,” she says.