Amid ICE Fears, Mental Health Workers Report Drop in Immigrants Seeking Treatment

On the outskirts of San José at Fowler Creek Park, rolling grassy hillsides stretch out towards the east, dotted with leafy shrubs and grazing cows. It’s a peaceful spot, where social worker Ruby Lopez-Flores used to love taking her clients to get fresh air, many of them the children of immigrant families.

“They sometimes don’t have the best home environment, and they just need to get out of the house for a second,” she said.

But in recent months, Lopez-Flores has been unable to hold her sessions at the park, as many of her clients have started avoiding public spaces out of fear of being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Social workers in the Bay Area and Central Coast told KQED they’ve seen a drop in people accessing mental health support as the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation agenda.

For Lopez-Flores, a member of SEIU 521, which represents thousands of public and nonprofit workers, this has meant making more home visits and even holding sessions in her car to accommodate her clients’ growing fear of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

“A lot of them fear coming home, and their parents won’t be there,” she said. “I do have clients that have already had encounters with ICE.”

The mounting anxiety comes as President Donald Trump has made immigration enforcement a key priority in his second term, taking actions like ramping up mass deportations, deploying ICE at airports throughout the country, and even challenging birthright citizenship.

It also comes as the agency has been the subject of intense criticism following violent encounters between its officers and protesters, including the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

As a result, immigrant communities around the Bay and Central Coast have stopped reaching out to mental health services out of fear of detainment.

“They’re scared to come into our building,” said Yvette Carreon, who chairs the SEIU 521 Monterey County Committee on Political Education. “They’re scared to leave their houses. Children are not going to school.”

For communities like Salinas and Pajaro, collectively home to an estimated 91,000 farmworkers, Carreon said the fear of encountering immigration agents has led to missed work and lost wages for a population that already faces severe housing insecurity and high rent.

“When they’re not working, they’re now starving,” she said.

One study that looked at the impact of ICE raids in the Southern California community of Oxnard last summer estimated the city’s agricultural workforce had shrunk by 20 to 40% in the aftermath of the raids.

The impact of increased immigration enforcement on mental health is studied by researchers, who warn that the effects are likely to be the most pronounced in children.

A Stanford study published in October found that immigration raids in the Central Valley early on in Trump’s second term coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences. Researchers said that the absenteeism could indicate developmentally harmful stress, potentially setting students back in their education.

Dr. Kathleen Roche, a George Washington University professor who researches the effect of immigration policies on Latino families, said that negative effects on youth are long-lasting.

She and a team of researchers studied a group of more than 500 Latino adolescents over four years. They looked at the effects of immigration related stressors, like a parent’s worries about work issues or avoiding medical care, on their child’s mental health. Families with someone who was detained or deported were more likely to experience heightened anxiety over separation and negative mental states.

“It certainly takes a tremendous amount of mental health intervention to help mitigate some of those harms,” Roche said, adding that there are likely to be long-term economic effects from the increased stress, as affected children are less likely to be prepared for school and jobs.

For Carreon and Lopez-Flores, those are the kinds of outcomes they want to prevent. Both reported that the children they work with are missing class and dealing with heightened, ongoing stress.

And, Carreon said, the stakes are high any time there are barriers to care.

“What happens when [our clients] crash, when they hit that rock bottom,” she asked. “Then sometimes it’s too late to intervene.”