Meryl Horn

It's that kid with, like, the hat and the Spider-Man backpack.

Mm-hmm.

Ice said that his dad abandoned him and ran from the officers.

His family says that they begged agents to let them keep the childs.

And there's reports that he and his father were seeking asylum in the U.S.

and are now being detained at an ICE facility in Texas.

And there can be long-term mental health effects from this, which can vary based on what exactly people are exposed to.

And scientists have actually been able to study this.

Like, in one paper, a group of researchers found about 70 adults who had all been exposed to immigration enforcement in some way when they were kids.

So maybe a member of their family or someone else in the community had been deported.

And then they did these like in-depth interviews with them, sometimes for hours as adults, and had them fill out surveys.

And it found that a lot of them had anxiety as adults and that the effect was stronger if they were exposed to an event that was more severe.

And then we also have lots of studies just generally showing that being exposed to violence, like police violence, is really bad for your mental health.

And while a lot of this research focuses on the people who are, like, really affected by ICE activity, we also have evidence that the ripple out effects from, like, a prolonged upheaval, like what's happening in Minnesota, might be huge.

So, like...

Moving away from the U.S., there was a study on Hong Kong that looked at the social unrest there in 2019, all the protests and the violence and how that affected people's mental health and like the general population there.

So not specifically protesters.

And they found that someone's risk for depression went from about 2% to 11% after the protests.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.