I don’t think many people truly understand the kind of traumatic stuff that undocumented persons have to experience in this country. [a personal thread]

I am a person who spent 16 yrs of her life as an undocumented person and the trauma is something I didn’t even fully realize until I started therapy in my 20s.

This thread are just some things I remember experiencing as an undocumented, white Latin American. The experiences of undocumented POC are vastly different and that is very important to remember.

This experience made me the person I am today. I don’t even know myself without this part of my life. Some things I remember:

1- having to make up stories about why you don’t have a health card and can’t go on most school trips (because in Ontario you always had to present your health card in case you got hurt on said trip - not sure if it’s like this now but it was like this when I went to school)

2- going to catholic school because public school asked way too many questions about status and required more documentation

3- not having many friends because what are you going to talk about when you can’t talk to them about this key part of your identity? There was always fear around talking about being undocumented. It was a big family secret that no one could know

4- fear of police because we knew family and friends who had been picked up by them and subsequently deported

5- always having a plan B, C and D just in case immigration came to our door

6- always having a plan in case immigration came to our school (because yes, that was a thing that happened to some undocumented children)

7- having a distorted sense of ‘home’ because ‘home’ was neither here nor there. Would we stay? Would we go? Would we ever fit in here if we stayed? Would we ever fit in over there if we were deported?

8-listening to my parents call immigration on their birthdays from a landline to say “I am calling immigration to report”. This gave immigration certainty that we were where we said we were and not “on the run”. At this point we were waiting on a response on our last resort app

9- listening to an immigration officer tell my mom not to worry she wouldn’t be deported today as a response to the fact that she was so nervous she could hardly communicate in English (in front of her children)

10- having to ask teachers and our priest for ‘support letters’ that we could attach to our humanitarian and compassionate grounds application and bursting into tears because you had never spoken the words ‘undocumented’ and ‘immigration’ outside your home

11- losing faith and never stepping foot in a church again after the priest made my mother cry for not being generous enough with her Sunday donations and subsequently denying her the support letter stated above because she was not generous enough to be worthy of a letter

12-listening to my sister tell me that a teacher made an immigration joke after she opened up and asked for a support letter. They were heading somewhere with the class and a cop stopped behind them. My sister was visibly nervous and he said “don’t worry, they won’t deport you”

13- not seeing family for years and years and years because you can’t go back home and missing them so much your heart literally aches

And that’s it for now. There are so many more like this. I could go on for years. Undocumented persons are everywhere contributing a great deal and doing it all with anxiety, depression and sometimes absolute loneliness.

In this thread I haven’t even talked about migrant workers, in depth experiences with language barriers and so much more. This is just a tiny glimpse. Something I rarely talk about but that has shaped me entirely.