On any given morning, I open up Instagram to see a litany of videos of masked agents chasing, tackling and arresting people who look like me. People who share my father's voice, who cry like my mother might. People who have tiny brown hands like my nephew, who wear their hair in long braids like I once did.

You, too, have likely seen the heartwrenching videos and images of the ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests happening across the United States as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan. An estimated 60,000 people are in ICE detention so far, and at least 180,000 people have been deported — 72 percent of whom do not have a criminal record. ICE is on pace to deport 400,000 people by the end of Trump’s first year in his second term. An expansion is expected to take effect in coming months, with $76 billion in funding and the audacious goal of recruiting an additional 10,000 new ICE agents.

There are stories of parents being picked up by ICE while at work, children being detained on their way to school and immigrants being detained at court hearings. Local swap meets such as Broadacres Marketplace temporarily shut down due to fears of raids, and individuals with legal residency, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals enrollment or visas are being swooped up in the chaos. 

In Nevada, school administrators witnessed fewer parents coming in to register their children, parents considering opting out of pre-K and students experiencing anxiety when they do attend school. Even in higher education, my own students have reported being afraid to drive to campus. My own family members are altering their day-to-day habits from how they get their groceries to how they drive because of heightened fears of immigration enforcement regardless of their legal status. And Trump has made one thing clear — he’s just getting started. 

As a family-separation scholar-practitioner and directly impacted immigrant, I am witnessing the history I researched repeat itself. While mass deportation and family separation are framed as administration policies, they are much more than that. They are refined, strategic weapons of social control deployed by the U.S. government not simply as an immigration deterrent, but as an insidious tool for transforming entire communities.

Family separation has been a tactic used against nearly every marginalized group in U.S. history to enforce white dominance: the separation of enslaved Black families to prevent uprisings during 400 years of chattel slavery; the kidnapping of Native American children through more than 120 years in boarding schools to deculturalize them; the internment of Japanese Americans through Executive Order 9066 during wartime; work camps during the Bracero Program; and mass deportations during Operation W-Back to scapegoat Mexican nationals.

What does this all mean for immigrant families now? This tactic has been used to disempower our communities and separate us not just from our families, but from our own bodies. Trauma has the capacity to transform us, and the empire has used it to pathologize us.

Rachel Yehuda is a pioneering researcher who has studied the phenomenon of epigenetics in the children of Holocaust survivors. Epigenetics recognizes the ways in which trauma is passed down to future generations and can cause certain genes to be activated or deactivated. In short, the impacts of trauma and stress can be inherited by children.

Immigrant communities are experiencing an active collective trauma as we bear witness to and are directly impacted by the multiplying attacks against our families. Whether we are undocumented ourselves, have undocumented family members, or are formerly undocumented, the effect is palpable. Family separation continues to have a compounding, intergenerational, epigenetic impact on the composition of family trees. It is a phenomenon now being observed in Latino children of immigrants who are experiencing racial disparities in health outcomes. 

Family separation alters their brain chemistry, producing anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidality in otherwise healthy children. The children of immigrants, including children who are U.S. citizens, living under the threat of family separation see significantly worsened educational, health and social outcomes as a consequence of the pervasive stress they experience.

As a scholar, I cannot help but recognize the pattern in Trump’s mass deportation plan as a strategically weaponized program aimed at criminalizing and scapegoating immigrant communities while simultaneously disrupting family structures in ways that are known to have long-term, negative impacts on child development. I argue that this administration is socially engineering the conditions necessary for health disparities, mental health impacts and criminality to promulgate within a population. Trump’s immigration “policy” is an all-out assault on families that has the potential to shape the next several generations of our communities, if we let it. 

In March, I attended the Indian Education Summit hosted by the Department of Native American Affairs at UNR. I sat in a room where Executive Director Stacey Montooth led a conversation offering insights about the legacy of boarding schools on tribal nations in Nevada. In the room were survivors of the Stewart Indian School and their children, who recounted the indelible multigenerational impacts the experience had on their lives. 

It became evident to me as an immigrant that my experience of being separated from my own parents for two years as a child wasn’t just personal — it was part of a collective trauma. Sitting side by side in this room were survivors who had been taken as children and now had to contend with the process of learning to become parents to their own children — while not having had the opportunity to have been parented themselves.

The children listened to the parents’ stories with such tenderness, such love and care as they began to understand the constellation of systems that had disrupted their families — and to appreciate the courage it had required to find light in all of it. I admired their refusal to be silent, to be misunderstood, to be pathologized, to be forgotten.

There is much we can learn as an immigrant community from our tribal relatives on how to navigate this moment. While research shows us that we have the capacity to inherit or pass down trauma, we also have the capacity to transform our trauma before it transforms us. Through holistic mental health supports such as therapy, storytelling, art and community, we can become the medicine to heal the pain inflicted on our family trees. Organizations such as Fuente de Vida and The Immigrant Home Foundation are providing culturally responsive support to impacted community members. 

As daunting as it all might feel, I am inspired by the collective care and effort I am witnessing to help us defend the future of our communities. We have fierce advocates and allies such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada (ACLU), the UNLV Immigration Clinic and Legal Aid of Southern Nevada.

All of them have been steadfast in their commitment to protecting our families against an authoritarian regime by holding Nevada entities accountable, reflected in actions such as the ACLU’s recent lawsuit against the Department of Motor Vehicles. The ACLU has also hosted several Know Your Rights events, provided legal support and deportation defense, shared resources and held training sessions. 

We have local leaders such as Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), who is demanding accountability through oversight of detention centers, and Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who has made several legal challenges, including joining a suit to protect birthright citizenship. We have educators who are raising awareness about the impact of family separation on families and children, and are preparing to provide a first-aid, harm-reduction centered response to the complex needs that arise. We have community organizations such as the Nevada Immigrant Coalition and Make the Road Nevada supporting families in crafting family preparedness plans and tracking ICE activity. We have mutual-aid groups such as Fifth Sun Project providing financial relief, meals and support to families. 

As we enter this next stage of the attack on our communities, we must stay grounded in our collective power and center those directly impacted who are closest to the solutions. We need to center social-emotional learning in schools and equip our children with the necessary strategies for healing and recovery from harm. We must tell our own stories and use our voices so that we may remember this moment and the weapons that have been used against us. 

Collectively we must take care of one another — particularly when the system won’t — so we can heal from this harm. As undocuqueer poet Yosimar Reyes reminds us: “this country is losing / the gift of our resilience / We will watch them as they tear into each other’s skins / and thank the heavens / we never turned beasts / like them.” 

El pueblo salva al pueblo. The community saves the community. 

Marcela Rodriguez-Campo is an educator and scholar-practitioner. Her research explores the intersection of immigration, family separation and educational trajectories. She is the founder of Co-Libre Education.