that unaccompanied minors 12 years of age and younger have been also tend to travel with younger siblings. Among all countries, less than children are embarking on a solo journey to the US at younger and younger ages. Unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border are also placed with ORR.
Why Leave Your Home? Undocumented immigrants often leave their country of origin due to extreme poverty, warfare, drug violence, domestic violence, sexual violence, gang violence, and similar traumas (Baranowski & Smith, Perreira & Ornelas, 2013). Unaccompanied children and families who Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. These three countries are often referred to as the Northern Triangle and have high rates of poverty and shares of people living on less than $2 per day; the international poverty Honduras’s murder rate at 90 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012, 12 years and under originated from Honduras. Furthermore, Mexico’s war to end drug cartels has led to widespread violence and death, with Research Center, 2011), leading to widespread exposure to violence and more unsafe and risky migration routes.
The unauthorized immigrant who embarks on this dangerous journey often enlists the help of a coyote, or human smuggler, as a guide extreme changes in temperature, the possibility of drowning while crossing rivers, abandonment by their coyote, rape, multiple forms of violence, or even death (Androff & Tavassoli, 2012; Baranowski & Smith, Given the nature of the journey, parents often struggle with deciding to undertake such treacherous travels with children. Immigrants weigh their options and choose to escape the harshness and trauma of everyday often following the trip, immigrants face a slew of issues ranging from
Once in America… If and when the family arrives in America, besides the political animosity immigrant family has a whole new set of traumas to work through. Members of the family attempt to process pre-migration trauma, migration trauma, and post-migration trauma, while attempting to begin their “new life.” If they were not separated at the border, the family lives
CLINICAL EDITOR’S COMMENTS:
Play therapists can help separated families speak their truths through play.
in fear of deportation and being separated if anyone learns about their immigration status. Hence, they live in a constant state of fear, which has countless negative consequences namely negative mental health outcomes (Kaltman, 2011). These conditions place the undocumented immigrant family unit, including U.S.-born children, at an exponential disadvantage when compared to their documented counterparts
Undocumented immigrant families also face other stressors in
addition to their pre-migration trauma history. Given their legal status, undocumented immigrants have limited employment opportunities due to cash-paying jobs, and more stressful living situations overall shown that undocumented immigrants tend to be underserved in both physical and mental health settings and they tend to have higher rates of negative outcomes, such as higher rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, al., 2020; Yamanis, 2020).
Mixed-status families, where one or two parents have undocumented status but one or more children are born in the US, experience more psychological distress, such as depression, anxiety, and fear, than non- distress and more negative outcomes at home and at school.
How a Play Therapist Can Help Undocumented immigrant children and families who enter the US via the US- Mexico border are vulnerable. They are often plagued with extensive trauma histories and additional stressors exacerbated by their legal status, which may impact their functioning and acculturation. Play therapists a trauma-informed model of care and working from a culturally humble perspective. Trauma-informed care is based on the principle that trauma is more prevalent and its effects more profound than providers may note, due to a lack of training/supervision or to families not disclosing previous traumas; clients’ trauma history needs to be explicitly addressed in mental health settings to better service children and families. Trauma-informed care is also based on the premise of creating safety, and returning control, consent, and empowerment to the individual, factors that were lost at the
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