“It unleashed all the worries we tried to calm down”: The Trump administration's impact on the mental health of immigrant communities

Abstract

A growing body of scholarship has established the role of immigration status as a social determinant of health but has not clearly delineated how socially-situated processes of interpretation and meaning making of the risks associated with legal uncertainty shape the mental health impacts of illegality. This article examines ethnographic and interview data collected during the election and first year of President Trump's presidency to answer the question: “How do political changes impact perceptions of risk, stress, and ultimately the mental health of Latinx immigrants, and what can this tell us about the role of sociocultural narratives in shaping experiences of illegality?”. This article contributes empirical knowledge about the psychosocial impacts of Trump's presidency on the mental health and well-being of immigrant communities, while also advancing our theoretical understandings of the ways that political discourses and cultural narratives shape how immigrants interpret and cope with the risks they face. I demonstrate how shifts in sociopolitical narratives about immigration not only generated increases in the frequency and intensity of status-related stressors that immigrants experienced but weakened coping strategies that immigrants had used to frame themselves as “relatively safe” in order to manage the emotional strain of deportability. Shifts in sociopolitical narratives about immigration motivated an increase in psychosocial cycles of deportability which impacted the mental health of undocumented immigrants, increasing anxiety and depressive symptoms, as well as social withdrawal.