By: Professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos, CMSC News – December 28, 2019
The CMSC has decided to launch in 2020 the Advocacy for Immigrants’ Mental Health Services Initiative, based on our 5-year experience relying upon group therapy sessions for the participants in our California-Mexico Dreamers Study Abroad Program, and the 3 Advance Parole Campaign advocacy trips to Washington, DC in 2019.
The purpose of this initiative will be to inform and educate the public regarding the psychological crisis affecting the immigrant population throughout the U.S., due to a pervasive state of fear generated by the Trump administration since coming into office in 2017, immigrant-targeted acts of violence as the August 3, 2019 El Paso, Texas mass shooting at a Walt Mart store, and the hate-crimes aimed against all immigrants, Mexicans and Latinos.
This hateful climate has rendered entire immigrant communities into a general state of panic, eerily similar to the 1930’s persecution of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany, and the massive deportation of Mexicans in the U.S. during the “Repatriation Era”.
Tragically, this condition of ‘State terrorism’ is affecting parents and the estimated 3.2 million undocumented children and young adults under the age of 24 in the U.S., according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). In addition, every year approximately 65,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools but cannot apply for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and out of that population about 25,000 of those students graduate from California high schools (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2015).
Unfortunately, since September 2017, the Trump administration has denied new DACA applications or Advance Parole travel authorization for current DACA recipients. Thus, entire immigrant communities have constantly suffered with fear, anxiety and emotional uncertainty due to their undocumented status.
This initiative reflects our comprehensive immigrant community psychological diagnosis, given that this sizable population of students reside in California and that they are no longer eligible for DACA temporary protection, there is a significant need to provide parents and K-12 students with school-based specialized mental health services.
In fact, school districts have suffered decreased enrollment due to the impact of increased deportations and the emotional crisis that is widely affecting immigrant communities, including U.S.-born students from mix-status families. This state of fear needs a response to be focused upon parents that need assistance from educational and mental health institutions, to cope with their emotional well-being and of their children in K-12 education, and at colleges and universities throughout the U.S.
The CMSC will promote the Immigrant Parents Organizing model presented at CSU Sacramento’s 4th Annual Keeping the Dream Alive Conference, which offers a strategy to address the psychological crisis affecting the immigrant community, and help educators identify and respond to the emotional and behavioral symptoms that require assistance for immigrant students and parents in K-12 schools.
The proposed model is based on the idea that parents must be engaged in a process of empowerment, in order to thrive and to become part of the solution through organizing Immigrant Parent Councils (similar to PTA’s). Thus, creating a safe space for them to participate in the assessment of emotional and psychological problems affecting their families, and the mapping of solutions.
This model will require the initial commitment and leadership from the schools, but Immigrant Parent Councils (IPC’s) may lead to increased students and parents’ participation in school activities and leadership roles.
Moreover, this concept reverses the deficit-based approach, which assumes that immigrant families need a handout, when in fact they represent an untapped human resource if provided the means to organize and build their own capacity to be resilient through the collective efforts of parents to survive and thrive.
While the CMSC is committed to continue the National Campaign to Restore DACA’s Advance Parole, we are motivated about taking on this new challenge as we enter 2020, when we anticipate the political vitriol in the U.S. will be worse than ever.
~Professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos, California-Mexico Studies Center President and CEO
