Family Separation at the US and Mexico Border Continues.

Record-breaking levels of asylum seeking by families with young children continue at the United States/Mexico border, particularly the Rio Grande Valley sector. In this Commentary, our aim is to increase awareness by providing child and adolescent mental health care providers with an update on current migrant conditions, bringing to light issues of family separation previously highlighted in the Journal.1 For context, our international group has collected data, via 3 large-scale studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, from more than 600 Latinx immigrants seeking asylum at the US/Mexico border in the last 4 years, during which levels of violence, climate disruption, and poverty in the Northern Triangle of Central America (ie, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) and Mexico have propelled high and sustained levels of asylum seeking in the United States. We contribute expertise in clinical psychology, Latinx psychology, attachment disruption, and public health, as well as this front-row perspective.

Understanding the nexus between undocumented immigration and mental health.

Based on the growing literature on the link between government policy and mental health, this article proposes a socio-ecological model to understand the way immigration policy and law enforcement specifically have become a key determinant of mental health among undocumented immigrants and their families. Based on the latest research on the subject, the article organizes and defines the spiral that goes from the main features of governmental immigration policy and law enforcement to the stressors they generate among the migrant community and mental health outcomes among different groups within it. It also considers the coping mechanisms migrants adopt to deal with their legal vulnerability, classifying them into those which worsen mental health outcomes and some which, paradoxically, make migrant communities resilient.