Shedding light on the short and long-term effects of detention and deportation

Blanca Ramirez is haunted by a little girl, Emma (not her real name), who stopped buying lollipops. Each lollipop cost a quarter, and the young girl loved to buy one every day after school.

But then Emma stopped.

Her undocumented father had been deported, and she was determined to contribute that daily quarter to her family’s finances instead.

Ramirez, a doctoral student in sociology at USC Dornsife, is researching what happens to families of Latino immigrants in California who have lost a parent because of detention or deportation. How do those left behind — including children — cope? To find answers, she interviews family members who have undergone this experience.

Inspired by her neighbors

A first-generation college student, Ramirez grew up in Orange County, California, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her mother was undocumented but legalized her status by the time Ramirez was six. Both parents are factory workers: Her father is a fabricator of laboratory equipment and her mother is a janitor.

During Ramirez’ childhood, many of the family’s neighbors were immigrants. Ramirez says her passion for her research stems from them.

“When I go out and talk to families, they seem like people I could have easily grown up with, but they’ve lived through so much more and they’re still standing and still trying to maintain their families,” Ramirez said. “To me, they’re some of the strongest, most resilient people I’ve met.”

Blanca Ramirez. Photo courtesy of Blanca Ramirez.

Ramirez remembers the widespread fear among her friends that a parent could be taken away in the night by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE. Those fears have increased in immigrant communities, she says, since the current administration’s immigration crack down.

“Through my undergraduate research at Cal State Fullerton, it emerged that immigration enforcement was part of the daily lives of immigrant families, so when I got into grad school at USC Dornsife, I already had questions about what immigration enforcement does to families,” she said.

The rewards of her work

In 2016, Ramirez chose to pursue her doctoral degree at USC Dornsife, drawn by the research of Jody Vallejo, associate professor of sociology and American studies and ethnicity and associate director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII).

Ramirez emailed Vallejo the summer before she started applying to graduate school.

“She responded and we met at a café in downtown Fullerton,” Ramirez said. “To an undergrad who was super nervous about emailing, the fact that she actually made time to come out and meet me was pretty amazing.”

Vallejo is now Ramirez’s doctoral advisor.

While at USC Dornsife, Ramirez has earned two of the most competitive graduate fellowships available to students — in any discipline: a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

Ramirez said one of the most rewarding aspects of her work has been a piece on her research that she wrote for the CSII blog.

“It was also written in Spanish and some of the participants in my study were able to read it,” she said. “Being able to give a little something back to my participants, who’ve given me so much by sharing their stories, has been for me one of the great things that’s come out of this research.”

The lasting effects of separation

One important effect on children in these situations, Ramirez finds, is that they are forced to take on adult responsibilities at a young age — a process she refers to as “adultification.”

“I generally find that children become emotional anchors for their parents because, although they themselves are going through psychological pain, they find ways to anchor their families,” she said. “They also try to give financial support to their family. Even if they’re too young, they still try in their own small ways to figure out how they can contribute financially.”

Ramirez relates the experience of children in San Diego who were forcibly separated from their undocumented mother when ICE agents arrested and deported her on the same day. The eldest daughter had to sacrifice her dream of earning a college degree to return home, find a job and care for her two younger siblings. Now, every weekend, the trio travels across the border to Tijuana to see their mother, who struggles to find work and is battling depression.

The daughter has also had to find ways to support her mother psychologically and financially. In effect, the daughter is supporting two households.

Ramirez’ research corroborates other studies showing that children also experience academic issues after their family members are detained and deported.

She hopes her research inspires critical thinking about the long-term effects of a single act of detention or deportation. “Latino immigrants and Latino children are going to be the majority of Americans in the future,” she said. “If their households are struggling as these kids are growing up, that will have significant consequences for the U.S. down the road.”