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The image is haunting: 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his bright blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, standing in his driveway with terror in his eyes. The hand on the handle of his pack is not his father’s. It’s that of a federal agent, and he’s being taken into custody, swept up like a toddler in a fuzzy pink jacket, or like several other children at Liam’s school.
In Chicago, we know the effects of such events from experience. Operation Midway Blitz took place last fall and has left a tail of catastrophic disruption in the lives of our children.
All our children.
Some of them have been directly exposed to violence, like the 8-year-old clutching a baby doll in a downtown Chicago park, begging masked, heavily armed agents to tell her where they’re taking her family, or the children crouching in a van, zip-tied and held at gunpoint as commands are shouted at their parents.
But the rest, and especially those from immigrant families, are also decisively affected, even seemingly less intensely so. The 9-year-old paralyzed in a grocery store aisle, unable to tell parsley from cilantro, whose parents can no longer risk leaving home to shop. The 7-year-old who refuses to go to school. He’s afraid of the stranger who escorts him each morning while his mother stays hidden inside. The 6-year-old who tells her brother, “We have to be good or ICE will get us.” These children are not living in a war zone overseas. This is Chicago. This is Minneapolis.
What U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing to immigrant families is not simply a policy failure. It is a large-scale state-inflicted trauma on children. The effects will shape their mental health, their relationships, and their sense of safety for decades to come.
As parents are detained, threatened, or disappeared, children absorb the violence in ways that are profound but often invisible. This is true even if a child’s own parents are safe. The terror looms: What they see on the news is not a movie or a bad dream. It could happen to them. Their suffering is overlooked not because it is minor but because it is unbearable to witness. Our systems are ill equipped to address the damage being done.
I am a co-chair and clinical supervisor of two mental health clinics on Chicago’s northwest side, where we work with families living under constant threat. When someone feels secure enough to reach out, the stories arrive by phone, over Zoom, or in person. When ICE is near, our therapy rooms are alarmingly empty. The children who need care cannot safely leave their homes without risking further harm to their families. Their silence is not recovery. It is fear.
Our families know that even with diminished ICE presence and press in Chicago, the threat continues. They know that despite the relocation of some Border Patrol units to other cities, ICE never left Chicago and continues to detain not just adults but children. They know that even the units that were temporarily withdrawn to places like Minneapolis and Charlotte left Chicago with an ominous message: We’ll be back. Our families cannot forget that the unthinkable is possible, even likely.
Trauma is about not only what happens in a moment. It is about what happens afterward: whether the world still feels predictable, whether caregivers remain present, whether trust can be restored. ICE’s actions have, over and over and over again, shattered those foundations. In clinical work, we see this clearly. Healing from complex trauma, in which the terrible events are ongoing, is not a matter of offering reassurance or prescribing medication. It requires a steady, responsive relationship over time, one that allows a child to slowly test whether safety still exists. The work is slow. It is emotionally demanding. And it cannot begin when children are trapped inside their homes, watching parents vanish.
Decades of research tell us this. The deepest harm to children is not physical violence alone, but the sudden, forced separation from their parents. During the Second World War, Anna Freud and her colleagues documented that children separated from caregivers suffered deeper and more enduring trauma than those exposed to bombing itself. Yet family separation has been placed at the center of this administration’s approach, even as its consequences are easy to turn away from. When a mother like Renee Nicole Good is killed, we speak a parent’s name, but we often fail to consider their children in the aftermath. We often fail to consider the effect on all children.
When threat becomes unpredictable, it spreads everywhere. Families live knowing that at any moment, without warning, they may be separated forever. Children across the cities that ICE occupies—across the country—learn that safety is temporary, relationships are fragile, and authority is something to fear. And the damage does not end with them.
I remind the clinicians I supervise that every child who enters our office brings seven generations behind them and seven generations ahead. Trauma that cannot be processed does not disappear. It embeds itself in bodies, behaviors, and relationships, passed down like an unspoken inheritance. Children may not have words for terror, grief, or rage. They may appear fine. They may act grown up. But what cannot be spoken is not resolved. It waits.
Our clinic staff members understand this intimately. Some have witnessed ICE actions themselves. Others have family members living under constant threat. They show up anyway. They listen. They translate fear into language that allows children to reconnect to other humans and themselves. They are not marching with whistles or cameras, but they are on the front lines of repair. Their work requires no less courage.
Few Americans believe that our mental health system is working well. Many who struggle with mental illness are treated with overmedication, incarceration instead of a solution, and impersonal care. The damage we inflict on children will only add a brutal confirmation that these failures carry enormous consequences for the future, as we generate trauma faster than we can possibly heal it.
The result will unfurl over years, not news cycles. Children will need sustained, funded mental health care from clinicians trained in childhood trauma, including care that reaches families who cannot safely leave their homes. This demands intentional planning from legislators, investment from philanthropists, and pressure from communities to move beyond reactive responses. Waiting for the next crisis is a choice—and children are paying for it.
What is happening in Chicago, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Los Angeles, and the next city to be ravaged by ICE is a widespread assault on essential family bonds. It is layered onto years of policy decisions that have already eroded childhood well-being, from cuts to food assistance to the hollowing out of schools. This is not a future problem. It is unfolding now.
