Meryl Horn

One said, quote, fear of getting deported keeps all of these folks away.

Also, even folks with green cards are afraid of losing their insurance now and have stopped getting necessary treatments, unquote.

So there's good reason to be afraid, actually.

And, you know, a lot of the work that we've been talking about here is just looking at like one individual ICE raid.

But what's happening in Minnesota is on a whole other level, of course.

I talked about that with Bill, who said that even though he's been in this field for 15 years, what's happening now caught him off guard.

Technically, that boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old, was detained, not arrested.

But yeah, you probably saw, you know, his photo was making the rounds last week.

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.