I’ve come to look for trauma in every place I go. This practice began years ago when, as a war correspondent in Congo, I encountered entire populations reeling from conflict and displacement – and it’s continued ever since.

I remember the wild-eyed 10-year-old soldier in Bunia who had developed a stutter after watching his parents’ massacre. He was now the militia commander’s bodyguard and one of the most feared killers in the group. Or in Bukavu, the woman who lay in bed staring at the wall, practically comatose, after having been raped by a dozen men.

Such horror, of course, isn’t exclusive to war zones or the developing world. And here in the richest, most powerful country on earth is a vast landscape of trauma found everywhere, from city housing projects to suburban country clubs.

Just scratch the surface and you’ll find it, telling a story of the land and its people.

When I reported from Belle Glade, Florida, nearly every kid on the town’s high school football team had lost an immediate family member to Aids, guns, or prison. Last year, while covering southern Ohio’s opioid epidemic, I met caseworkers suffering severe PTSD from managing a never-ending surge of traumatized children.

Most recently, I spent several weeks in the Rio Grande Valley, driving across the border into Mexico. At migrant shelters and bus stations, I met families from Central America who fled from violence, survived the harrowing odyssey to America, only to be jailed and separated once here.

But I also encountered trauma in people you might not suspect.

I met lawyers experiencing secondary trauma – the compassion fatigue that comes from absorbing the suffering of others – after watching clients get deported back into harm’s way. Immigration judges are also dealing with the same stress.

And I spent time with local families – both documented and not – whose trauma has been triggered by raids, cartel violence, and the daily grind of poverty in one of the most militarized corners of the world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A US Customs and Border Protection agent searches for undocumented immigrants during a helicopter patrol in McAllen, Texas. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

In May, when the Trump administration imposed its zero-tolerance policy along the border and began separating families seeking asylum, pediatricians and mental health experts warned of the long-term damage children would suffer. Research now shows that prolonged exposure to toxic stress is linked to chronic health problems such as cancer and heart disease years down the road, a public health crisis that doctors are only beginning to grasp. Trauma brews like slow poison in the body and, when left untreated, spills over into loved ones, into the classrooms and the surrounding community, infecting every sector of society. And along the border, I found it everywhere I looked.

For Nora, who’s from Honduras, it was her six-year-old son who first showed signs of severe trauma. The boy had forgotten how to speak. Ever since Nora had awoken Alex and his two brothers in the middle of the night and fled their home, she’d noticed him slipping. They’d fled from the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang which now terrorizes Central America, having been formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by migrants who settled there after fleeing the US-backed civil war in El Salvador and violence in Guatemala and Honduras, only to be deported back to their countries.

Nora and her boys had covered more than 3,500 miles, across Guatemala to Tijuana and now to Nuevo Laredo, in north-eastern Mexico. Along the way, Alex had grown agitated and was constantly afraid. He had nightmares about his father, who had disappeared back home, and was wetting the bed. And his sentences, once rapid and cartwheeling, had become choppy and unformed, as if trauma was editing him down to a toddler.

Now there was more reason to be afraid. A man who’d offered to drive them from the bus station turned out to be a smuggler working for the local cartel. He’d brought them to a stash house in a run-down neighborhood, one of many used by smugglers to hold migrants while they extorted them for money. The smugglers demanded $6,500 to take them across the river into Texas, a journey of less than a mile. When Nora said she didn’t have it, they rummaged through her bag and took her cellphone, looking for relatives who could pay ransom. Then they put her and the boys in a room alone to ponder their chances. Her oldest son, who’s 10, asked what they all feared.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gang violence is part of everyday life in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and police patrol the streets regularly. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

“Mom, are they going to kill us now?”

For Nora and her boys, everyday life back in Honduras had been a minefield of traumatic experience. In their sprawling colonia along the Caribbean coast, the MS-13 gang ruled by fear and murder.

“They told us what to wear,” Nora said. No T-shirts with logos, no pants with holes. If you left town for work or vacation, the gang stayed in your house. And business owners were especially targeted, having to pay 25% of their profits as extortion, she said. The rattle of gunfire rang through the kids’ bedroom windows most nights. Corpses, shot up and dismembered, greeted them on their walks to school.

Kids as young as 10 were taken by the gang to serve as police lookouts, or “chivas”, regarded as little more than fodder. She says one of the men had already approached her husband about taking their oldest boy, so Nora and her husband had started paying 1,500 lempira a month (about $62) just to keep him and his brother in school. When Nora’s cousin had refused to work for the gang, some chivas had punished her by cutting off her breasts. “The police do nothing,” she said. “They’re outgunned.”

In mid-February, Nora’s cellphone rang at one in the morning. It was her husband, and there was panic in his voice. “You must take the kids and leave,” he said. “Do it now.” The two of them owned a small butcher shop in the colonia. For nearly a year they’d been forced to pay the gang $250 per month, more than half of their profits, but her husband had fallen behind. He didn’t have the money this month, and both of them knew what that meant.

Frantic, Nora threw some clothes into a bag, woke the boys, and they fled on foot into the night, she didn’t know where – just north, toward safety.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mother migrating from Honduras holds her one-year-old child as she surrenders to US border patrol agents near McAllen, Texas. Photograph: David J. Phillip/AP

In recent years, a growing body of research has revealed that people who experience prolonged levels of trauma, especially as children, have higher rates of chronic disease and mental illness. For migrants, the separation and isolation, experts said, both qualified as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, that trigger the brain’s “fight or flight” mode and cause toxic stress.

Prolonged exposure to toxic stress raises blood pressure, heart rate, and floods the brain with cortisol and other chemicals, which can rewire neural pathways and change the very architecture of the mind. In children, too much toxic stress can sabotage the nervous system and affect learning, memory and decision making. It can elevate levels of inflammation in the body that cause heart disease, stroke and autoimmune disease, and disrupt growth and development. It can even alter your DNA and change how it gets expressed.

The list of ACEs, first introduced in a landmark study in the late 1990s, includes such things as physical, emotional and sexual abuse, mental illness or substance abuse in the household, a loved one being incarcerated, divorce, neglect, and others. By 18, most people are saddled with at least one ACE that therapy or resilience can sometimes overcome, depending on the experience – sexual abuse can leave deeper wounds than, say, divorce.

If left untreated, however, two or three ACEs can have exponential impact. Just two ACEs by age nine doubles your odds for ADHD. Teenage girls with four ACEs are twice as likely to get pregnant. Just three ACEs makes you five times more susceptible to a drug problem, nine times more likely to attempt suicide, and doubles your chance for morbid obesity. In Washington state, researchers found that over a quarter of heart disease was rooted in some form of trauma.

“Imagine you’re riding your bike really fast and you take a clump of clay and put it on your chain, which is our DNA in this case,” says Dr Aaron Miller, a child abuse pediatrician at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, New York. “The chain might break or stay intact, but it’s not able to work the way it used to, and so you go off course pretty quick.”

Doctors say that recent migrants often complain of headaches, chronic pain, sleeplessness, feelings of sadness, and experience catatonic depression. Immigration attorneys in the Rio Grande Valley talk about clients who are so traumatized they’re nearly impossible to represent. “They just can’t focus,” one lawyer said. “They have trouble understanding the law, doing interviews, just being present.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sara sits in the room at La Posada Providencia, a Catholic-run shelter outside of San Benito, Texas. Originally from El Salvador, she is waiting for a February court date for her asylum claim. Photograph: Katie Hayes Luke/The Guardian

Six months and 4,000 miles later, Nora still hasn’t heard from her husband and neither has his own mother. When her middle son Alex began to lose his speech, he’d told her, “I’ll get better once I see Dad. Dad will teach me how to talk again.” Sometimes when Nora was desperate she called his brother and the boys tricked themselves into believing it was their father.

Back at the safe house in Nuevo Laredo, Nora’s oldest son asked again, “Are they going to kill us now?” Nora’s mind felt like paper-thin glass, ready to splinter. “Nothing’s going to happen,” she assured him.

Although horribly traumatized herself, the journey had also sharpened her wits. Before the smugglers seized her phone, Nora had secretly removed the SIM card holding all of her contacts and hid it in her bra. “Even if they killed us,” she figured, “they’d still have my family’s numbers.” Now she slipped the card to her oldest son to hide in his jeans.

“His face turned white,” she recalled, but he knew what to do.

Miraculously, the ruse worked. The smugglers had no one to call, and sensing that killing the family was more trouble than it was worth, they finally let them go.

You get to a place where you just don't know what to do. You look at your kids' faces and don't know what to tell them. Nora

A Catholic charity had driven them several hours to Reynosa, where I met them at a migrant shelter operated by local nuns. Reynosa, located across the international bridge from McAllen, is a current battleground in the turf war between the Zeta and Gulf cartels. Hundreds have been brutally killed in recent years, the violence radiating its own wave of trauma across the mucky green river. The previous day, Nora and the boys had tried to walk to the American side to apply for asylum. She had a sister in Louisiana who’d agreed to sponsor them. But a Mexican customs agent turned them away before they could even cross, she said, for reasons she didn’t know.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman rests her head on a table inside a shelter for migrants in Tenosique, Mexico. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP

We sit outside with other asylum seekers, along with those who’ve been recently deported, while the nuns serve lunch. Hanging overhead is a portrait of St Vincent de Paul, patron saint of charitable societies, the 17th-century French priest who dedicated his life to caring for sick peasants. Nearby, Nora’s boys fiddle with her cellphone and play tag with other children. As Nora tells their story, she does so quietly, careful not to trigger them. Weeks earlier she’d found a psychologist to check Alex’s regression. “They say he needs counseling,” she tells me, then breaks down. One of the boys comes over and sees that she’s emotional, then quickly runs away. She hasn’t slept in weeks, she says. Sometimes she’ll start to cry and can’t stop.

Volunteers soon arrive to take them to the international bridge further south in Matamoros, where she hears they’re more lenient. She has zero money.

“You get to a place where you just don’t know what to do,” she says. “You look at your kids’ faces and you don’t know what to tell them. You have to be strong, but …” Her voice trails off. I wish Nora good luck, then watch as she and the boys lug a single duffel bag containing everything they own out the tall metal gates, out into lawlessness.

For adults and children alike, one of the most overlooked stressors comes from loss, says Dr Selma Yznaga, associate professor of counseling at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who works with recent arrivals. It’s the crushing loss of identity and culture after fleeing their homes into a liminal wilderness, and the loss of dignity from being a stranger, from being robbed, raped or kidnapped.

“One of the mediating factors in ACEs is how strong an identity you have,” Yznaga says. “If your identity and dignity are stripped by the journey, then you’re even more vulnerable to trauma.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Selma Yznaga, associate professor of counseling at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, works with recent arrivals. Photograph: Katie Hayes Luke/The Guardian

Worse, she says, once they arrive, “There’s another loss, this dream that once they get to America everything is going to be OK, and it’s not. It’s a dream they’ve had for generations, this land of milk and honey, and it’s shattered. Once here, they’re just treated like trash.”

Migrants aren’t the only ones haunted by trauma. In interviews with immigration attorneys along the border about their clients, I began to notice a common weariness, a battle-induced fatigue. At the time, the Trump administration had just ended its family separation policy, leaving local attorneys to locate the children and untangle the mess.

“The sheer amount of work it takes now just to see a client is amazing,” says Rochelle Garza, an attorney in Brownsville. Phone calls and emails often go unanswered. Officials won’t accommodate meeting space with clients. During family separation, immigration officials told Garza that her client, a child, “doesn’t want an attorney. He doesn’t want to see you.” Once, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) blocked her from entering a detention facility because her auto insurance card was expired. She had to hitchhike with another lawyer just to get through the gate.

But most dispiriting for lawyers is the sheer futility of the exercise. Between 2012 and 2017, the success rate for asylum seekers in the Valley was around 44%, according to Trac (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse) Immigration. Now it’s plummeted to around 7%, attorneys say. Garza, like the majority of her colleagues along the border, has never won an asylum case.

“The burnout for lawyers is huge,” she says. “And what burns people out is that realization you’re not able to help because you’re so limited.”

I recognize that darkness, that frustration. As a wire reporter in Congo covering a decade-long war that garnered little attention, I knew that futility. My colleagues and I filed daily stories and were lucky if something flashy about Ebola or gorillas landed on a front page. Everything else – corruption, a village quietly dying of cholera, or anything upbeat we could manage – didn’t have the wings to make the journey. Over time I grew paranoid from the constant violence, depressed by all the bodies I was tallying.

I still drive home after talking to 20 mothers, and cry all the way there Lawyer Jodi Goodwin

Garza knows the feeling. “I’ve had nightmares where I’m torturing people,” she says. “Because that’s what these kids were telling me they saw, people being burned in acid.”

I ask Garza how she’s caring for herself these days. She looks at me quizzically, then laughs.

Most young lawyers have trouble striking a work-life balance, says Jodi Goodwin, a veteran immigration lawyer in Harlingen. “They haven’t developed coping mechanisms and skills for recognizing their own secondary trauma.” Twelve years ago, Goodwin hit the wall so hard she woke up one morning and couldn’t move. “I didn’t get out of bed for two weeks,” she says. “I had to call someone to come feed my kids.”

Her own recovery was long but taught her the importance of caring for herself. Since Trump took office she’s witnessed so much burnout among local lawyers that last February she organized a retreat on nearby South Padre Island. “I thought four people would show up and 20 wanted to come,” she says. Together they meditated, walked the beach, and Goodwin shared some of her own ways of coping with stress.

“I still drive home after talking to 20 mothers and cry all the way there,” Goodwin says. “But that’s part of my coping skills.” Another crucial skill that she and others have learned is how to redefine success through the appeals process, stringing out a case, especially when deportation is a potential deathtrap.

“Sometimes winning is losing really slow,” she tells me. “Sometimes winning is keeping your clients here as long as you can.”

On the other side of the bench, immigration judges wrestle with their own secondary trauma. A 2008 study from the University of California at San Francisco found that judges have higher rates of “secondary trauma stress” than doctors or prison guards and suggested it could desensitize them to the plight of asylum seekers. The burnout, it says, “includes a decreased sense of personal and/or professional accomplishment, emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, eg distancing oneself from the job, cynicism and loss of compassion, all of which could affect the outcome for applicants whose fates rest in judges’ hands.”

“It compounds their political predisposition to deny,” says Carlos Spector, a longtime attorney in El Paso. “I’ve had judges tell my clients, ‘Stop it, I don’t want any more tears in this court.’ It’s horrible.” (Calls to the National Association of Immigration Judges went unanswered.)

When a storm in late May flooded the Indian Hills colonia east of McAllen, the water spilled under doorways and began to rise. Parents grabbed their children and scrambled outside for help, only to find Ice agents already waiting in trucks. “Get in,” they beckoned. “We’ll take you to a shelter.” The families refused to go, taking their chances with the rising water.

All through the Valley, Ice agents are showing up in places once deemed safe: court hearings, emergency rooms and at mobile clinics that service the poor, people told me. The sick and elderly aren’t going to the doctor for fear of being stopped along the roads. At El Milagro Clinic in McAllen, the manager, Margarita Alvarez, says there’s been a decrease in indigent patients. Even a trip to the supermarket strikes paranoia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Martha Sanchez, community organizer with La Union del Pueblo Entero (Lupe) at the Lupe offices in San Juan, Texas. Photograph: Katie Hayes Luke/The Guardian

Meanwhile, children, fearing parents could be snatched away, stew in their toxic stress and become unhinged. One woman tells me her daughter screams, “Kill them! Kill them!” whenever she sees police, after her father was deported. She hyperventilates when she hears sirens, wakes up screaming in her bed, and has become violent in school. She’s four years old.

“This administration has led to the rise of people feeling hunted,” says Martha Sanchez, community organizer with La Union del Pueblo Entero (Lupe) in nearby San Juan. “Look at how much damage we’re causing them. There’s a ton of kids here who need therapy.”

The Indian Hills colonia is a maze of tumbledown homes with dirt yards and high chain-link fencing, each one like a cage protecting it from the next. It’s here I meet Rosa. She and her husband, both undocumented, support their four kids by running a nearby taco stand, and Rosa volunteers for their local community group by managing its website. She’s broad-shouldered with straight dark hair and a gaze that feels a thousand years old.

“We don’t take assistance,” she tells me, proudly. “We’ve never been on welfare.”

One morning last December she and her 17-year old son were at home when someone banged on the front door. Rosa opened it to find Ice and drug enforcement agents swarming her front porch with guns drawn. They accused her of smuggling drugs and undocumented people, but after searching the house they found nothing. Rosa suspects the agents had the wrong person, or someone in the neighborhood had fingered them for some reason. Whatever the case, they arrested Rosa for not having her papers and led her out in handcuffs, her son looking on in horror. When they got outside, she saw that her husband was already in the patrol car. He’d been unlucky enough to be in the yard when agents stormed in.

She and her husband spent two months in detention, bouncing between different facilities before he was finally deported. Meanwhile, their 17-year-old son was left to care for his three siblings and run the family business alone. “He left school and sold tacos,” she says. “He paid our bills.” Separated, each family member suffered significant stress. Rosa became deeply depressed, catatonic much of the day. Her eldest son became ill from anxiety and sleep deprivation, and his eye developed a constant twitch. But the isolation was most excruciating for her youngest son, who is 10. “He draws pictures of me and my husband being arrested,” she says. “In them he has a knife to protect me from police.”

Rosa eventually found a lawyer and posted an $8,000 bond. When she left detention, she didn’t tell her children; she wanted to surprise them. Since the family has missed Christmas together, she asked a friend to gift-wrap a large box and place it in their living room while the kids were at school. “When they got home, they saw this big Christmas present,” she says, her eyes widening. “And when they opened it up, it was me! I was in the box!”

We’re sitting in my car when she tells me this, the interview taking place outside a convenience store because Rosa is worried about her identity. She pulls out her phone and shows me the video of the kids finding the present, her bursting out of the box, and her little boy swarming her with outstretched arms. We sit and watch it together, both of us crying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shoes are left by people at the Tornillo port of entry near El Paso, Texas during a protest rally by several American mayors against the US administration’s family separation policy. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

But there is no happy ending, I learn. Her husband tried to rejoin the family by crossing the river and was caught, detained again. And Rosa was left with her children and the damage their leaving had caused. Not long ago, Rosa took the kids to a psychiatrist who prescribed them medication for anxiety and depression.

But the stress finally broke her oldest boy. Days after Rosa got home he had a panic attack. “I can’t stand it,” he shouted, “they’re going to deport you in court!” He cried in her arms and Rosa tried to soothe him. When she left for work that evening, he took his father’s pickup and sped through the colonia, out of his mind. A patrol car happened past and began pursuit. But her son, terrified, refused to stop and drove straight home, where he was arrested in the front yard for evading arrest.

“He’s such a good kid,” Rosa says, sobbing. “They put him in jail. Now he has a felony.” His court date was in mid-September, right around the same time as his mother’s.

Later that night I go to dinner and sit at the bar. I’m staring at my notes, feeling agitated. It’s a Friday night and the place fills up quickly. Two middle-aged Hispanic men, nicely dressed, take a seat beside me and one of them asks what I do. When I tell him I’m a journalist he starts describing, remarkably, his moonlighting gig of smuggling migrants to safe houses in the Valley. We order rounds of drinks and the men disappear outside to snort cocaine in a pickup. Once back, the smuggler pulls out his phone and dials up a video. “Have you seen these?” he asks, shouting over the bar crowd. “If you’re a journalist then you have to see these. This happened just 10 miles from here, outside Reynosa.”

In the video I see a man lying on a concrete floor, stripped naked, bound and blindfolded. As he struggles to free himself, another man walks in holding a small filet knife. And in four clean motions, he hacks off the prisoner’s arms and legs and leaves him squirming on the floor.

The blood drains from my face. I ask the smuggler, “Why do you have these in your phone? How can you watch them?”

He pulls up another video, another death along the border that emits a poison ripple. “Everybody’s seen these, bro,” he tells me. “It’s just part of life down here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The international bridge in Brownsville, Texas. Photograph: Katie Hayes Luke

One of the great mysteries of trauma is who it chooses to hold and who it lets go, for it is fickle with whom it grants passage, much like the border itself. We know a child’s chances of crossing over are better if one parent or guardian can remain stable, providing what scientists call the “scaffolding” – something to hold on to in the swift current and onward to solid ground, toward resilience.

The day before I leave the Valley, I receive a message of good news. Nora, the mother from Honduras who’d been kidnapped with her three boys, had made it safely to the other side. The four of them were scheduled to leave on a bus that evening, bound for Baton Rouge.

I’m sitting in the McAllen station when the kids come running inside. Nora trails behind, looking exhausted but happy. “We made it,” she says, smiling big. “By the grace of God, we made it.”

At the Matamoros bridge, the Mexican agents had allowed them to reach the other side, where an American official had established credible fear and given her an application for asylum. After two days of sleeping on the office floor, they’d given Nora an ankle monitor and released them into America, her dignity intact. I’d never heard of a case that easy.

In her hand is a stack of bus tickets for Houston and Baton Rouge, where her sister will help her find a job, probably cleaning houses. She’ll enroll the kids into school, hire a lawyer, and find a counselor for Alex. And then she’ll decide what it means that her husband is still missing.

As they stand in line for the bus, I remember something Nora had said back in Reynosa, still trapped in that liminal space between the third world and first: “When you lose everything and you’re like a rolling stone, the US is the only place that feels like future.”

As they’d crossed the long international bridge, she tells me, the four of them had suddenly stopped when they reached the middle. It was there her oldest boy had shouted, “Look! Mom! I can see the American flag!” And with that, they pressed on toward the only hope that remained, their past in ruins inside them.

Bryan Mealer’s latest book is The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream. He lives in Austin. Contact him on Twitter: @bryanmealer



