Fear followed Alberto Velazquez every time he left the apartment he shared with his mother and siblings in Pomona, Calif.
If he saw a cop walking on the sidewalk, he said, his first instinct was to turn around and walk the other way.
“I was becoming irrational and paranoid,” said Velazquez, who is now 24 and enjoying the security of being a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) beneficiary. “I kept thinking if something goes wrong, the cops would be at my door.”
Velazquez’s mental state is typical of undocumented immigrant youth, according to a study released April 21 on the mental health of undocumented and uninsured youth called “Pol(ICE) in My Head,” a project of UCLA’s Dream Resource Center (DRC). Researchers, many of them undocumented youth themselves, interviewed 550 people across California over a period of 10 weeks to find out how much access to health care they had, especially to mental health services.
“The mental health needs of undocumented [people] are rarely addressed,” observed Josue Chavarin, a program associate with The California Endowment, which funded the research.
Research coordinator Alma Leyva of the DRC said that the large number of immigrants deported since Obama became president, combined with “excessive surveillance” by law enforcement officials and barriers undocumented youth face in areas such as health care, education and social services, are factors contributing to the high level of stress many of them experience.
[For more of this story, written by Viji Sundaram, go to http://newamericamedia.org/201...h-alert----study.php]
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