The Terror Of Living With Immigration Anxiety

In March 2023, Guadalupe “Lupita” Zepeda was driving home in Tucson, Arizona, after spending the day selling handmade herbal remedies, ritual supplies, and altar tools at the Fourth Avenue Spring Street Fair. She had barely broken even and was on the verge of a panic attack. She felt angry, guilty, and ashamed.

It wasn’t just that sales had been disappointing. In her mind, the slow day had confirmed her worst fears: As an undocumented immigrant, she was a failure, living proof of every stereotype she had grown up hearing about women like her.

“Coming from an undocumented standpoint, to me, I was a disappointment. I couldn’t make it work. Your mind goes places,” Zepeda, who migrated from Mexico to Arizona in 2003 at 9 years old, tells Refinery29 Somos.

A mom of two, Zepeda wasn’t just scared for herself, but also for her boys. Markets weren’t paying the bills, but her legal status often closed doors to better-paying jobs and economic stability. On the drive home, the 32-year-old was emotionally depleted when, all of a sudden, she found herself moments away from a collision. A vehicle entering the highway didn’t match the flow of traffic, trapping Zepeda’s car. If she sped up, she risked hitting the car in front of her. If she braked, the vehicle behind her could crash into her. And there was a car to her left that gave her nowhere to go.

“It happened so quickly — two seconds, maybe three,” she says. “I saw everything happening at once. I remember closing my eyes and letting go of the steering wheel because I thought, ‘I’m not getting out of this.’” Her car spun across multiple lanes of traffic. “For a few seconds, I was completely out of control,” she says. “I was waiting for the impact.” But when she finally opened her eyes, she looked around in disbelief. The freeway was clear. She drove to the far-right lane, took the nearest exit, and pulled over with her hazard lights flashing. And then she broke down.

“I screamed into the steering wheel,” she says. “I had this moment of, ‘Am I alive? Am I here? Did that really just happen?’” She was alive. But the “susto” — the shock and fright of the near-crash — lingered. The experience compounded the shame, fear, and sense of failure she was already carrying after the disappointing market day. 

Over the next few days, Zepeda developed a painful, itchy rash. Uninsured and unable to afford medical care in Arizona, she crossed the southern border to get affordable care in Mexico, where a doctor diagnosed her with shingles. While stress does not directly cause shingles, medical experts say periods of intense psychological and physical stress can weaken the immune system, allowing the dormant virus that causes the disease to activate. Looking back, Zepeda believes the terror of the near-crash pushed her body past its limit.

But it was more than that day’s events. By then, Zepeda had already been diagnosed as a child with complex PTSD, depression, and anxiety related to forced migration trauma and years of xenophobic bullying. As a mom, she was also living with the daily fear of being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and separated from her family. 

Six years earlier, while driving through Oracle, Arizona, Zepeda had been pulled over by a sheriff with her infant son in the back seat. When she couldn’t produce immigration documents or a birth certificate for her boy, the deputy called immigration authorities. Zepeda, fearing she would be arrested and deported, cried and pleaded with the sheriff, even pointing to the stretch marks on her belly as evidence that she had given birth to her baby. But when her son began crying in his car seat, the sheriff — a new father himself, she recalls — softened. Instead of waiting for immigration authorities to arrive, he let her go. 

“Can you imagine your cortisol levels rising while living as prey for animals everywhere you go,” Zepeda asks me. “You’re constantly alarmed and alert of your surroundings. You can never fully rest. You haven’t earned it. You don’t have the papers for it.”

Living With Immigration Anxiety

Psychologists refer to this unease as immigration anxiety, the chronic stress, fear, and uncertainty around legal status, detainment, deportation, family separation, discrimination, financial insecurity, language barriers, and navigating unfamiliar systems. 

Experts say its effects are not only mental, but also physical and spiritual, shaping how people think, feel, cope, and make meaning of their daily lives. Over time, that sustained stress can keep the nervous system in a prolonged state of heightened alert, contributing to symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and sleep disturbances as well as increasing the risk (or worsening) of conditions like hypertension, cardiovascular disease, anxiety disorders, depression, gastrointestinal disorders, and more.

“When we are in a constant state of fear, our muscles are tense and our bodies ache. It’s a heavy lifting. That what-if-this-happens, even if it never happens, can be just as hard on our system,” Geraldine Peña, licensed professional counselor and founder of Live Truthfully Counseling, tells Somos. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, she works largely with clients much like Zepeda: Latina immigrants.

Since President Donald Trump’s return to office and renewed focus on immigration enforcement, she has seen a rise in immigration anxiety. And not just in her practice. According to a 2025 KFF/New York Times survey, 41% of immigrants across the country said they worried that they or a family member could be detained or deported, up from 26% in 2023, a 15-percentage-point increase in just two years.

Even Zepeda, who’s now a green card holder and business owner of the spiritual shop Yōlia Botánica, still lives with daily anxiety around immigration. “I’m afraid I’m going to get my green card taken away any day now. An ICE agent can look at my green card and say, ‘nah, it’s fake,’ and re-open that gushing wound,” she says. “I fought so hard for this. I earned this. Yet it can be dismissed so quickly, so I’m constantly alarmed and aware of my surroundings.”  

It’s a fear Khloe Rios-Wyatt understands as well. The 37-year-old migrated from Mexico to Santa Ana, California, when she was 11 years old, living undocumented for 20 years. During that time, she was also navigating her gender identity as a young trans woman, an intersection that made her feel at once invisible in some spaces and hypervisible in others.

“My immigration status shaped so much of who I am, my education, my employment, and my long-term planning,” Rios-Wyatt tells Somos. Despite those challenges, she became a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), received a bachelor’s degree in communications, and in 2020, founded and serves as CEO of Alianza Translatinx, the first organization led by trans people of color in Orange County, California.

Still, Rios-Wyatt says success doesn’t guard her from being targeted. In some ways, it made her more visible and, thus, susceptible to discrimination and violence. Understanding this vulnerability, Rios-Wyatt works with trans immigrant Latinas who face compounded risks that are often overlooked within the immigration system. 

For instance, trans women are sometimes placed in detention facilities that do not align with their gender identity, where they’re at risk of harassment, isolation, and/or physical and sexual violence. Even more, many trans folks in detention centers don’t have access to medical care, like hormone therapy or HIV medication, and interruptions in these treatments can have devastating physical and emotional consequences. For some, the threat of deportation adds another layer of danger, as trans women usually face even greater violence, discrimination, and lack of access to affirming health care in their origin countries. 

Even now as a U.S. citizen, Rios-Wyatt continues to experience this immigration anxiety. “It affects your mental health, your relationships, your own sense of security,” she says. “Those experiences don’t leave you. When I travel to Mexico, I come back and fear they will question my citizenship status.”

For Rios-Wyatt, those fears have been compounded by recent policy changes affecting trans Americans. In January 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to recognize only two sexes — male and female — based on sex assigned at birth for official documents. Following that order, the State Department stopped processing passport applications requesting an “X” gender marker and suspended requests to change gender markers on passports. The policy has been actively litigated and has been blocked and reinstated at various points, creating legal uncertainty and fear for trans people, particularly trans immigrants who have passports expiring soon.

“When multiple parts of who you are become the subject of debate, it creates a deep sense of vulnerability, not just fear of one specific policy,” Rios-Wyatt says. “It’s exhausting having to always defend your existence, dignity, and your right to belong.”

The Ripple Effects of Immigration Anxiety on Families

But immigration anxiety also affects another group: people with legal status who love or depend on someone without it. According to the Pew Research Center, millions of U.S. citizens have at least one undocumented parent, including about 4.6 million children under the age of 18. Researchers say these children often experience fear, stress, and emotional strain in ways that negatively shape their sense of safety and stability.

Tony Vara grew up in Northern Virginia with a constant fear that his mother would be deported to El Salvador. “It’s like anxiety where there is no pill you can take to make it go away,” Vara, 25, tells Somos. “I knew she’d be taken one day. I felt it in my bones.” It had already happened once. In 2007, when Vara, who is of Salvadoran and Honduran descent, was 6 years old, he was sent to live with his aunts while his mother was detained and later deported to El Salvador. He grew up believing she was in prison. She later returned when Vara was 8.

When Vara was 11, he thought it was happening again. ICE officers came to their apartment looking for a relative who had previously stayed with the family. Except, this time, they put him in handcuffs, saying he matched the description of the 30-year-old man they were searching for, an adult with facial tattoos. While he now laughs at the absurdity of the alleged mistaken identity, he admits it left him on edge, though mostly for his mom who may not have been unshackled had she been the one cuffed. “It was a worry for me. I was like, what if ICE gets her,” he remembers regularly asking himself.

While Fairfax County eventually became somewhat of a sanctuary jurisdiction, limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities, he and his family still took precautions. He never opened the apartment door to strangers, and he never told anyone his mother was undocumented. He took family road trips without her, and he began working at 14 because his mother often had to leave jobs when employers implemented E-Verify, the federal system used to check workers’ employment eligibility. 

And, of course, he memorized his mother’s A-number, the identification number assigned in immigration proceedings, in case of an emergency.

So on July 1, 2025, when Vara — then a content creator living in Los Angeles — received a frantic call from his 17-year-old sister saying their mother had been detained and that, as the eldest sibling, he needed to return to Northern Virginia to help with her case, he froze: “Maybe it was a trauma response, but I actually forgot her A-number and had to look for it,” he says.

He did eventually locate it and took a flight home that same day, emotionally shaken by the news and what it might mean for his family. “I’m not a crier, but I let out all the emotions because I knew I wouldn’t have time later. I knew my siblings would become my responsibility, and I knew if I cried, they would cry. So I’d have to put on a front for them,” he says.

For the first few weeks, Vara was “like a robot,” on autopilot just to get through it all. Authorities kept moving his mother from city to city, so much of his time was spent tracking her location, meeting with lawyers, and taking calls with her as she described what she was experiencing — including, he says, being denied medical care and being pressured to self-deport.

Then there was the caretaking. “I remember when I had that realization, like, ‘oh my God, I’m these kids’ parent now,’” he says. When his mom was ultimately deported in September, he brought his brother, 8, to be with her in El Salvador where he would attend a bilingual school. When that didn’t work out, Vara flew his mom, brother, and sister to Barcelona for a fresh start. But, ultimately, that wasn’t viable, either. Together, the family decided that Vara’s teenage sister would live with her father as she wrapped up her senior year, while he and his younger brother would move in with Vara’s paternal grandmother. She’s now helping Vara care for his brother until the school year ends, after which the boy will return to El Salvador to live permanently with their mother and Vara will head back to L.A.

Even with a plan, balancing it all — a full-time job, content creation, caregiving, and becoming his mother’s advocate, all while grieving her deportation — has been overwhelming. Right now, Vara’s primary goal is to help his brother get through the school year, but he says the boy often asks for their mom and, at times, he struggles with how to respond. An EdWeek Research Center survey found that student anxiety from immigration enforcement increased from 50% in the fall of 2025 to 57% in the spring of 2026, with a reduction in student attendance. In cities like Charlotte, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Orlando, thousands to tens of thousands of students didn’t show up for the 2025-2026 school year, even forcing schools in heavily Latine and immigrant-populated areas to close due to the drop in enrollment.

But the experience is taking a toll on Vara as well. “If I’m being honest, the selfish part of me feels like my life was turned upside down,” he says. “Growing up first-generation and low-income, my dream was to leave home, and I did. I moved to L.A., I escaped Virginia, I made it. And now, a year into it, this happened, and I’m reverting back to how I grew up — sleeping on the floor and sharing a room with multiple people.” 

Peña says this reaction is normal. “When someone is forced to grow up too fast, without time to develop a stable sense of self and with a parent deported, they are pushed into adult responsibilities before they are ready,” she says. That accelerated development, she adds, can lead to stress, anxiety, and frustration.

While Vara has not yet gone to therapy to process what he has been through, he hopes he can soon. “I wish I had taken care of myself, because masking how you feel takes a toll, mentally and emotionally,” he says.

Healing Through Community

When therapy isn’t an option, Peña wants folks to practice useful coping strategies. And when it comes to immigration anxiety, she says traditional tools used for general anxiety don’t always help. With general anxiety, a person is often worried about a future outcome that may never happen and can sometimes use evidence to challenge or reframe those fears. But immigration anxiety stems from real risks of detainment, deportation, and family separation that are substantiated with government policies, statistics, news reports, social media videos, and personal experiences, so fact-checking could actually elevate anxiety.

Similarly, while some people struggling with anxiety may benefit from mindfulness or meditative practices that encourage them to turn inward, Peña says she is often cautious about relying on those approaches alone with immigrant, and especially Latine, clients. Instead, she encourages them to look outward — toward community.

“For Latinos, there’s a culture of familismo, of community, of talking. And this is ancestral,” Peña says. “Our people have always gathered, shared meals, danced, practiced their faith, laughed, and had pláticas. They get together to get through difficult moments. It’s important for them to lean on what is familiar, what works for them.”

For Vara, that has meant nightlife. While he avoided going to clubs for some time after his mother was detained and he took on caring for his younger siblings, his mom encouraged him to go out, reminding him that one Saturday night wouldn’t change what was happening with her case. So he did. “Honestly, going to the club is what’s kept me going through all of this,” he shares. “I can’t help but think people would judge me for that, but the truth is, it’s being with my friends, my community, laughing, just doing something that makes me feel normal again.”

That community support is why Rios-Wyatt founded Alianza Translatinx, to offer hope to people living in fear or unable to imagine a future for themselves. At the drop-in center, trans folks can access a range of services, like community support groups, behavioral health care, health care navigation, a food pantry, housing assistance, and administrative support for legal matters and gender-marker changes on official documents. 

But more than that, it’s a space where trans Latines and immigrants can lean on one another and see what’s possible for themselves. “I learned that hope is collective. We don’t always have to have hope ourselves. Sometimes we borrow it from others,” Rios-Wyatt says. “There were moments in my life when I couldn’t see a clear future, but someone else could see it for me. We need to know that our current circumstances are not the full story of who we are and what is possible for us.”

In Tucson, Zepeda shares her own story openly and creates an environment at her shop where others feel safe to do the same, building community and trust. Every week, people enter Yōlia Botánica carrying the weight of immigrant anxiety. On the shelves of her shop, they find books about decolonial well-being, self-care bath salts and balms, crystals, and herbal remedies. But, Zepeda says, what they are mostly looking for is free: belonging.

“We are so disconnected from culture and communities living in such a stressful economic situation. We are divided. We are at maximum capacity,” Zepeda says. “And this is where prayer and ancestral practices come in and give us a foundation, reminding us that we have always belonged to something.”

Understanding the healing power of her tiendita, as she calls it, she opens her doors to anyone who needs it, whether it’s just to come in, sit down, and exhale for the first time in their day or for a heart-to-heart chat. In return, Zepeda receives something just as powerful: hope. The hope to keep going, yes, but for the first time, the hope to dream. 

For many people who grow up undocumented, imagining the future isn’t just difficult, it’s scary, because so much of life is restrained by their legal status. But Zepeda says she is finally beginning to free herself from those limitations.

“I’m allowing myself to dream more lately and, for the first time in my life, acknowledge that I’m going to be a very big voice. My journey doesn’t end here. I know I have the capacity to make big waves because I’m finally allowing myself to dream that big,” she says, her voice brightening as she speaks.

Before Zepeda could dream bigger, though, she had to heal, and that is her hope for all immigrants struggling in this country. “I had to be brave, face myself, and understand that I deserve better. And that’s what I want to keep inspiring in others: resiliency, not out of survival, but out of deep self-respect, self-love, and self-compassion.”

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