05 Feb ‘We’re Not Equipped for This’: Bay Area Mental Health Expert on the Impacts of Trump Immigration Orders

(Kirsten Strough / U.S. Department of the Interior via Bay City News)

By Aly Brown
Bay City News

For Bay Area licensed clinical psychologist Carolynn Gray, the second President Donald Trump term is already different.

As someone who has worked with migrant communities for 15 years through nonprofits, her own private practice, and as a supervisor of other clinicians across the state, Gray noted the difference now is the intensity.

“The amplification — the turning up the dial of intensity — on the dehumanizing language, the willingness to use more force and focusing on the immigrant population as if they are responsible for the difficulties that people are experiencing in this country, that’s the difference,” she said.

Since Trump’s second term began Jan. 20, he has expanded arrests and deportations and is revoking “sensitive location” protections, which would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enter churches and schools. His executive orders and policy changes have also included an attempt to end birthright citizenship protected under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and rescinding several of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders, such as Executive Order 13993, which prioritized deportation based on security threats.

Gray said the impacts of sweeping executive orders targeted at immigrants has created a mental health crisis beyond what many — especially new — clinicians have been trained to handle. Some of the clinicians Gray supervises throughout California are faced with questions like: “How do I talk to my 8-year-old about the possibility of Grandma getting deported?”

“We’re not equipped for this. We’re not lawyers,” she said. “We have people asking us to help them with something that we can do almost nothing about except ask them to hold onto hope, which sometimes we have almost no business asking them to hold onto.”

She took heart in the fact that local Bay Area health agencies have taken a clear position on supporting the undocumented patients in need of care. The Alameda County Board of Supervisors last week further assembled an “Alameda County Together for All” committee to provide advice and guidance on how to respond to Trump’s immigration policies.

In a virtual town hall Tuesday, leaders from the American Civil Liberties Union, a nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1920, discussed the lawsuits launched to block several of Trump’s actions from his first two weeks in office, sharing Gray’s perspective that his second term will be nothing like the first.

“They’re better prepared, they’re faster off the block,” said Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director. “There’s ideological alignment among the Trump administration officials. They are endeavoring to do as much of their radical plan that you saw in Project 2025 as we allow them to.”

Cecillia Wang, ACLU national legal director, called litigation a tool to put an immediate stop to unlawful government.

“We’ve already taken four major actions to challenge the Trump administration’s immigration orders,” Wang said, noting during the call that Trump was presently sending flights of deportees to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base where they will be held in an immigration detention center. “We’re looking at that very hard and preparing for litigation there, and he’s invoking other statutory authorities in an extreme way that no president has ever done, and we’ll be looking to challenge him every step of the way.”

ACLU leaders called for those interested in volunteering to sign up at aclu.org/joinpeoplepower.

Gray called for those feeling powerless to help to be vocal about their support for the immigrant community.

“When you stand with people who see the humanity in one another and agree that we should treat each other with dignity and respect, you can see that there is hope,” she said. “You can see that there is something to do, even if it’s just sharing a lemon from your tree today, because maybe tomorrow it’s a blanket, and maybe the next day it’s taking a video of ICE detaining your neighbor so that there’s a record of what’s happened.”

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