“Living Legal Trauma; How Punitive Immigration Policies Affect Community Helpers”

• In Event: Latinx Politics in the Neocolonial Era

Abstract

Advancing research on the spillover effects of punitive immigration laws on immigrant families and communities, this study asks how human service workers’ professional and personal lives are impacted by legal violence through the embodiment of trauma. We draw on interviews with 110 ‘community helpers’ working with asylum-seeking unaccompanied children across human service sectors in Texas and California to illuminate the enduring complex physical, psychological, social, and emotional consequences of providers attempt to buffer children from the legal violence of deportation threat, legal and social exclusion, and poverty, what we term legal trauma. Findings show that federal and state political contexts shape experiences of legal trauma. While all community helpers evince legal trauma symptoms, including changes to physical, mental, and emotional health and social behaviors, the impact of legal trauma on community helpers’ personal and professional lives is shaped by state-level policies, proximity to their clients’ identities, gender, and parent status. As inequality grows, leaving more communities exposed to legal violence, and the social safety net declines, it is vital to the future of vulnerable populations, including asylum-seeking children, to understand how everyday human service work impacts community helpers’ personal and professional lives.

Author

• Stephanie L Canizales, UC Berkeley