The Trauma Being Created Right Now

We are living in a time where it's important not to look away. We know the events of the last few weeks are ones for the history books, and it's heartbreaking to live in times when families are being torn apart. Parents taken while their children watch or children harmed while their citizenship is questioned. People detained indefinitely with no due process, no legal recourse, no end in sight.

When we talk about the family separation happening at the border and in neighborhoods across the country, the news cycle often frames it in terms of policy or politics or enforcement. 

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about 5 year old Liam Conejo Ramos who came home from preschool with ICE agents waiting in his driveway. Some believe ICE agents used Liam as bait to capture his Dad, with his mother begging them not to take her son away. The agents refused and now both Liam and his father are detained in a detention center in Texas. His middle school brother came home to find them gone and his mother terrified.

The family had entered the United States legally, seeking asylum from persecution in Ecuador. They had a pending asylum case, they followed every step required. 

What's happening to Liam right now, in this moment, won't stay contained to this moment. His stress hormones are reshaping how his genes will express themselves. The terror of being used as bait, of watching his mother beg for him, of being taken from everything he knows is writing itself into his biology in ways that will echo forward into his children and possibly his grandchildren.

What Family Separation Does Across Generations

Studies on children separated from their parents, whether through war, genocide, forced displacement, or detention, show consistent patterns. The earlier the separation, the more severe the trauma, and the more likely it is to become biologically encoded.

When someone experiences the terror of being separated from their family, particularly when that separation feels arbitrary and incomprehensible, it doesn't just create a memory. It alters brain architecture, resets stress hormones to a permanent state of high alert, and changes the epigenetic markers on genes involved in emotional regulation, immune function, and stress response.

For children whose systems are still developing, these effects are even more profound. Their nervous systems are being wired in real time, and what gets encoded during experiences of terror and separation becomes the foundation they build everything else on. Adults carry this trauma too, in their bodies and in the biological information that can be passed to their children.

These aren't temporary effects that fade when the child is eventually reunified with their parent. These are biological changes that persist.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study, one of the largest investigations of childhood trauma and its effects, found that separation from a parent is one of the most damaging experiences a child can endure. Children who experience this kind of disruption show higher rates of anxiety, depression, autoimmune disorders, heart disease, and early death decades later.

What we've learned about epigenetics is that this trauma doesn't stop with the person who experienced it.

When Liam eventually becomes a father, his children may arrive already carrying the biological signature of what happened to him on that cold January afternoon when he came home from preschool. His stress response system, permanently altered by his own separation, can pass epigenetic marks to his children through his sperm, marks that were encoded years before those children were even conceived.

His children might be born with nervous systems already on high alert, stress hormones already primed to overreact, emotional regulation systems already taxed. Not because of anything that happens to them directly, but because of what happened to their father when he was taken from his home at the tender age of 5.

All of this is happening to a child whose family entered the country legally, who had a pending asylum case, who had no deportation order. They did everything right, and it still didn't matter, it still didn’t keep this family safe.

We Are Creating a Public Health Crisis That Will Outlive Us

What's happening to Liam and many of the other children caught up in ICE enforcement right now is not just an acute trauma that he will need to overcome. His biology is being altered in ways that will persist and transmit to the next generation.

His middle school brother, who came home to find his father and little brother gone and his mother in terror, is also experiencing trauma that reshapes biology. Every member of this family, every child in their neighborhood who watched this happen or heard about it, is absorbing a lesson about safety and trust and who holds the power to separate families, that will be encoded at a cellular level.

Every neighborhood living under the threat of raids, where children go to school not knowing if their parents will be there when they get home, is a community experiencing chronic stress that alters immune function, increases inflammation, and creates the biological conditions for generational trauma.

This isn't speculation. This is established research about what happens when you terrorize families and separate children from their parents.

This photo of Liam in his blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack standing next to federal agents that has now traveled around the world. That image is creating its own kind of record, a visual document of what we're doing, but the biological record being written into Liam's cells will persist long after that photo fades from our collective memory.

When you do this systematically, to thousands of families, you are engineering a public health crisis that will outlive every policy maker who created it.

There is no neutral position here. The science is clear about what family separation does to human biology. The government has access to this same research and they are choosing to continue anyway. We cannot control that choice, but we hold the power to witness and document what's being done.

Of course, Liam will carry what happened on that Tuesday forward into the rest of his life and if he goes on to have children, they will  carry it forward. We are creating trauma that will echo through the decades to come. 

The science of epigenetic inheritance tells us that trauma travels forward through generations. It also tells us that resilience can travel forward too, that the same biological pathways that transmit pain can transmit recovery.

First, we have to stop creating the trauma, understanding that when we separate families, we are making a biological intervention in the lives of children and their children and their children's children.

In the witnessing what's happening to Liam and thousands of other families is very likely causing stress, frustration and anxiety, its important to know, you're not alone in feeling that. The same science that shows trauma gets encoded also shows us that tending to our own regulation matters. Take breaks from the news. Put down your phone and stop the scroll. Move your body in any way you enjoy. Connect with people who ground you. Get out into nature. This isn't about looking away, it's about sustaining your capacity to witness without collapsing under the weight of what you're seeing. You can care and still protect your own wellbeing.

If you have the capacity, find local organizations supporting families facing deportation and donate or volunteer. Contact your representatives about stopping family detention policies. If you're bilingual, offer translation services to organizations supporting immigrants. What's happening to Liam is being witnessed, with neighbors showing up and teachers speaking out. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been raised by strangers who will never meet him. This isn't just kindness, its real time support when it matters most.  When communities come together around families facing this kind of trauma, when people don't have to face terror alone, when they're surrounded by others, it changes what gets encoded. 

We are watching trauma being created in real time. We're also watching communities refuse to let it be the only story being written.