Resilient Immigrants in an Unhealthy System

LAST SUMMER, THE FUTURE of for-profit prisons seemed bleak. The U.S. Department of Justice announced it would begin phasing out its use of privately run prisons and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security quickly followed suit, declaring that it would reconsider its use of privately run detention centers. Stocks for companies that ran for-profit prisons plunged.

But then Donald Trump was elected president, and private prison stocks immediately soared. The nation’s largest prison company, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), reported a boost of more than 40 percent in the value of its shares. Given Trump’s promises to “create a new special deportation task force,” investors bet that privately run detention centers will play a key role.

And the investors may be right. Every year, DHS detains about 400,000 undocumented immigrants in 250 centers nationwide, and 62 percent of the beds in these centers are operated by for-profit corporations.

According to Maria-José Soerens, a licensed mental-health counselor serving undocumented immigrants in Seattle, there are two major problems with for-profit detention centers. First, for-profit centers are not held accountable to the standards that govern federally run centers. In her work in these centers, Soerens has heard complaints ranging from a lack of medical attention to inadequate opportunities for parent-child visitation; one young woman who was having suicidal thoughts was kept in solitary confinement until she told guards she was “better.”

But the deepest problem, explains Soerens, is that most detention centers only exist because corporations saw a “business opportunity.” Beginning in the early 2000s, for-profit prison companies successfully lobbied Congress to expand drastically the number of beds in the immigration detention system—a move that doubled the revenue of the two largest for-profit prison companies. In 1998, there were 14,000 beds available for immigrant detention; today, there are 34,000.

“This is why it’s interesting to be a therapist working within the immigration system,” Soerens told Sojourners. “The insanity is in the immigration system, not in the people. The people are gifts.”

This philosophy—immigrants are gifts, not problems—led Soerens to found Puentes, a nonprofit in Seattle with an innovative approach to helping undocumented immigrants “cope and flourish despite our broken immigration system.” Sojourners associate editor Betsy Shirley talked with Soerens about the intersections of undocumented immigrants, mental health, and faith—and what this means for the church in the U.S.

Sojourners: Why do you focus on the mental health of undocumented immigrants?

Maria-José Soerens: When it comes to the undocumented, you cannot separate their mental health from their political location. Immigration status determines all aspects of your daily life: who you can talk to, access to health, job security, and the constant fear of being separated from your parents or your children.

All of that is stressful on a daily basis, right? Yet there’s countless research that has shown that new immigrants, particularly Latinos, and people of color in general, do not use mental-health services.

Why not? Experts talk about barriers such as price of services and location, which are true. But we don’t really reflect on how our model and our assumptions are just not relevant to the people who are not using our services.

What do you mean by “models and assumptions”? Every science operates under assumptions. In psychology, we forget that our scientific knowledge is an expression of a particular cultural tradition. For example, there is a strong European tradition in psychology that suggests that a primary human impulse is to “seek meaning.” When you work with immigrants, you see that what many of them look for is not necessarily meaning—they’ve got the meaning; indeed, they see signs and wonders everywhere; they are a very religious crowd. According to some anthropologists, many immigrants see crossing the border as a faith journey.

Instead, what immigrants are seeking is liberation. But as a community of professionals, we don’t know how to address that; it’s not built into psychology. So we’re trying to recapture the tradition of liberation psychology from Latin America.

What’s liberation psychology? Liberation psychology developed out of liberation theology in El Salvador in the 1980s, in the context of the Salvadoran war. Drawing on that tradition, at Puentes we choose to look at “the Latino” as a valid dialogue partner. Usually in public health they are looked at as a problem to be solved; people say things like, “Oh, there’s such high drug use” or “There’s so much domestic violence” or “If we teach them the right information, they’re going to change and be happy.”

A psychologist at the University of Oregon said that the biggest challenge for psychologists is to attract minorities to the clinic. But at Puentes we recognize that we don’t need to attract people and educate them and colonize them with our frameworks on mental health; instead, we need to look at people as serious dialogue partners and see what resources their community already has.

Okay, so using that framework, what resources does the immigrant community have for coping with oppression? One of them is solidarity. I’ve seen more than 300 people, and I can count with my fingers the ones who have actually gone to talk to our counselor, much less who have stayed in a therapeutic process. But most of them, if not all of them—what they really want to do is participate in the liberation of the community.

How is that a mental health resource? What I have found through my own experience and working with other people in la lucha [the struggle] is that community organizing, political organizing, and community development are avenues that help people to change their conditions but also get to know themselves. Leadership development is tremendously important as a tool of self-knowledge—knowing one’s own story, knowing one’s own value, and, as one of my mentors often says, healing the scars of lifelong oppression.

So as a psychologist, what’s your role in this liberation? I try to understand their personal agenda: What do they want, and how can I mobilize resources to help them achieve their goals? I want my clients to learn that that they are not alone, they matter, and that we can work together.

Could you give me an example of what this looks like? A woman I worked with, I’ll call her “Maria,” was a victim of domestic violence here in the U.S. At the time she did not have access to resources—she was living under a bridge with her children. I was doing an evaluation for Maria, and during the interview she tells me, “I just don’t want anybody to have to go through that. So I want to become a promotora de salud [a lay community-health advocate], just like my mother [in Mexico].”

So I said to her, “Okay, Maria. Let’s do it. How do we mobilize the resources for you to do what you need to do?” Let’s look at this clinically: Maria’s experience is that no one has ever cared for her. In her words: “Nothing works out for me ever.” In fact, her U Visa [a visa for victims of crimes] was rejected.

After we talked with Maria’s attorneys, we started some community organizing to get Maria’s U Visa application reconsidered. And when Maria says, “Nothing ever works out for me,” we tell her, “No, Maria, we’re going to do it, you are not alone. We care. You’re part of a movement.”

At the same time, Maria is being trained as a health promoter, because she wants to help other women. So we don’t see Maria as a victim of domestic violence or a client that we’re helping; we see her—in all her glory—as a tremendous resource to the community.

Are there times when medical intervention is necessary? We need to think about levels here: For people who are struggling with schizophrenia and psychosis, there are tools for them in the clinic—they need medication and treatment. But there’s a whole spectrum of people who have chronic post-traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety, who could benefit much more from the support of a strong community around them.

How does your faith inform your work as a psychologist? My faith invites me to look at systems from the narrative of resistance. And when you look at American psychology from the narrative of resistance, it’s very easy to see how the technique has been detached, disengaged, and comfortable: You do your notes, you care about HIPAA laws, liability, and the main focus of your practice is not to ever get sued.

But in order to walk alongside people, you have to step out of your place of comfort and step into vulnerability. For me, being vulnerable looks like being an expert witness in an immigration court—it’s basically like defending a dissertation repeatedly. I’m very uncomfortable and I want to cry every time I’m there. But that’s where faith comes in.

What would it mean if Christians in the U.S. recognized immigrants as dialogue partners? It would mean seeing them as legitimate neighbors and protecting them and their families. It was devastating to learn that an overwhelming percentage of white evangelicals voted a man into office who vowed to deport 2 million people on day one. As a country we chose to jeopardize the safety of millions of families who are part of our community and who are now being persecuted and separated. We will see the consequences of our actions in the mental health of an entire generation of children who are growing up in fear.

This is an area where the church needs to come together and make an important decision: Will we work at the service of our fear or at the service of Jesus, who tells us to love our neighbor, and also, that we are one body? If Christians recognize this—that immigrants are part of our own body, that what is done to them is done to us—we will be able to come together and defend families in our communities.

Lately, my Facebook feed has been plastered with—and I apologize—privileged Christians whining about how the church has failed them. And then I go to the detention center in Tacoma [Wash.], which is like any detention center: very oppressive conditions, daily human rights violations. But the faith there is alive; people believe that God is showing up for them and they get together to do Bible study. And I’m thinking: The church in North America needs to hear you.

So that’s what it means to me to see people as a serious dialogue partner. It’s not necessarily for their own sake, it’s for the sake of everybody. Everybody’s voice needs to be heard because there’s a lot of wisdom among us—and this is where my liberation theology comes up—especially among the oppressed.