Hearing my friend, an elementary school teacher, say she had to undergo training on what to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up at her school did it for me.
After that conversation, I couldn’t sleep for days.
What the Moment Revealed
It wasn’t the training itself that kept me awake. It was what it signaled throughout my body.
That this way of communicating, this level of preparedness, has entered places meant to be safe
That we are being asked, quietly and efficiently, to normalize the unimaginable.
That fear is no longer an exception, but a protocol.
With so much hate-filled language circulating right now, it can feel as if a powerful force is deliberately trying to desensitize our shared humanity. Language saturates the air until cruelty feels ordinary. People are reduced to categories. Fear becomes background noise.
And yet, I find myself returning to something older than outrage: the concept of cycles.
If I practice ancestral wisdom, and I do, then I must also trust what most land-based traditions teach. Everything is in motion. Impermanence is not an exception. It is the rule.
Call me an optimist, but the notion of cycles and transitions is the last thread I am holding in my blanket of hope. What we are witnessing is not an endpoint, but a turning. A contraction before a shift. A moment in history that will one day be named, studied, and re-membered.
This does not make it painless. It makes it contextual.
When Reassurance Becomes Dismissal
One of the phrases I hear most often, usually offered with good intentions, is this:
“You’re a U.S. citizen. This won’t happen to you.”
But statements like this do not calm the nervous system. Research on trauma and collective threat shows that minimizing fear often increases distress, because it invalidates lived experience and removes emotional agency.
What that phrase really asks is this: disconnect from your body, from your history, from your community, and perform safety.
But safety that requires pretending is not safety at all.
Many immigrants and children of immigrants are not living from a place of safety and ease right now. We are living hyper-aware, vigilant, constantly scanning for threat. To be told that our fear is irrational is to be told, once again, that we are imagining what our bodies already know.
A close friend called me recently, nearly in tears.
If you saw her, you would never guess the weight she carries. She is a naturalized U.S. citizen, at the top of her professional field. The mother of a young soldier. The wife of a disabled US Marine Corps veteran.
She is also a former DREAMer, someone who put herself through college without access to federal financial aid or federal student loans, without the safety nets others take for granted.
Someone in her inner circle made a casual comment about taking citizenship away.
That was all it took, just as it was for me when I first heard about teachers receiving training on what to do if ICE shows up at school.
Her body went into terror. A racing heart. Shallow breath. A full anxiety response. Not because she lacks logic, but because her nervous system remembers what precarity feels like.
This is the part that gets missed when immigration is reduced to policy alone.
The body remembers, even when the paperwork says you’re safe.
Placing Ourselves in the Cycle
Here is the reframe I want to offer, not as advice, but as lived understanding.
Migration is not a failure of humanity. It is a constant in human history.
Anthropology, history, and Indigenous knowledge systems tell a similar story. Every modern nation has been shaped by waves of movement, both voluntary and forced. People have always moved. Some by choice. Others by force. Many by survival. Modern borders did not erase this reality.
When we forget this, we begin to speak in absolutes. We stereotype. We collapse millions of lives into a single narrative. In doing so, we create what is often described as collateral damage, harm inflicted on people who do not fit the caricature yet are punished by it anyway.
There is something else that needs to be said, clearly and without apology.
Stop the moral policing of how immigrants show up for their communities.
Do not confuse being a “good immigrant” with performing support in ways that ignore personal circumstances, risks, and histories.
Do not measure worth by how loud, visible, or palatable advocacy appears.
Do not assume silence equals indifference.
Many immigrants are navigating layered fears related to parents, children, spouses, legal status, and economic survival. Trauma research is clear that under chronic threat, people respond differently. Some mobilize publicly. Others protect quietly. Both are survival responses. Both are valid.
Pride in one’s roots can coexist with restraint.
Engagement can happen without being public.
Service does not always look like a protest.
And yes, immigrants do show up for their communities, often in their own capacity, using their own language, resources, and ways of being in relationship. Not out of guilt, but out of reciprocity. A paying forward of the goodness many have received along the way.
Support does not have a single shape. Care is not a performance. For many, showing up happens quietly, in ways that are less visible but no less meaningful.
From lived experience as a Re-Planted woman — a term I use in my work and in Awaken Your Roots to describe those who adapt without erasing themselves — and supported by trauma-informed and community-care research, I have seen that these forms of support consistently matter:
● Volunteering, even if it is quietly, especially with organizations that work behind the scenes to protect, accompany, and stabilize immigrant families.
● Engaging with elected officials, through letters, meetings, and sustained civic participation rather than public confrontation.
● Sitting one-on-one with those in distress, offering presence, listening, and companionship when fear isolates and overwhelms.
These are not lesser forms of action.
They are regulated ones.
A Pause for Reflection
Before responding in any way, I invite you to pause with these questions:
Where does your belief about immigration come from?
What stories did your family inherit about belonging, power, or displacement?
Who benefits when we remain angry, divided, or dehumanized?
Many old traditions remind us,“Blessed are the peacemakers.”Peace is not weakness. It is discipline.
Anger fueled by hate may feel righteous, but it also deepens division and is easily manipulated. When we are constantly activated, individually and collectively, we lose the capacity to think and see clearly. History shows us who benefits from that.
And if you are like me, you may be tired.
Tired of violence and hate.
Tired of fear.
Tired of being told you are not doing enough, or doing it wrong.
Still, many continue to show up for their communities, knowing this work is a labor of love, a quiet pilgrimage away from division and toward reciprocity.
History moves in cycles. One day, someone will ask where we stood.
And I hope we remember not just what we believed, but how human we allowed ourselves to remain.
About the author:
Lorena Saavedra Smith is an author, pacha philosopher, ecopsychologist, and mindfulness guide. Originally from Perú and replanted to the United States, she weaves Andean ancestral wisdom with contemporary ecopsychology to help individuals reclaim dignity, inner grounding, and a sense of belonging.
For more than two decades, Lorena has accompanied immigrants and culturally displaced women through the emotional, relational, and spiritual complexities of replanting in a new land. Her work draws on a multidisciplinary background that includes ancestral philosophy, somatic awareness, nature-based practices, and her lived experience as a naturalized U.S. citizen and Navy veteran spouse in the Washington, DC area.