President Obama called for the nationwide mass deportation of illegal immigrant families from Central America at the beginning of 2016. The majority of deportees are women and children fleeing from gang violence and cartel wars which are directly fueled by the enormous demand for drugs here in the US.
Deportations have traditionally been categorized under foreign policy. However, they should also be considered a health policy due to major health impact deportations cause on families and communities affected. Deportees may already exhibit higher than normal stress levels even before deportation due to acculturative stress and the persistent fear of being prosecuted and caught by immigration authorities. Once deportation is carried out, the psychological trauma of family separation and fear of being sent back to the place where they fled from may induce allostatic overload. As a result, I hypothesize that mass deportation will have negative health outcomes and evaluation is critical in advocating legislators to fix broken immigration system so that deportations of Central Americans and Latinos(a) can stop.
Deportees are very few times granted pardons, so to study the effect of deportations we can track health outcomes for 10 years of those who were granted refugee status and stayed here in the US versus those who were deported back to their home countries. Data from deportees can be collected by partnering with medical brigades who provide yearly primary care in Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Stress levels can me measured by looking at cortisol in hair samples in addition to giving out a survey with the aim to measure psychological health in deportees and their families.
This test obviously presents huge obstacles, from collecting data in other countries to adjusting for all the variables given the widely different communities that deportees are being sent back to. Nonetheless, we should learn more about it given the major health implications mass deportation has on affected families and communities.