6 events in Passaic County with a date

ICE detention centers run like prison camps

By: Joan M. Cook
Your Turn
Guest columnist

..... An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on July 3 [2026] fatally shot Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, 25, a Colombian national who had just left his wife and toddler daughter to go to work outside Portland, Maine.
..... Less than a week earlier in Houston, an ICE officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, an unauthorized migrant form Mexico and father of three U.S. citizens.
..... these killing reawakened debate over aggressive ICE practicalities, but even when the agency doesn't kill, the fate of the people it targets is often lengthy detention followed by deportation. As of mid-January, [2026] a record 73,000 individuals were being held in more than 200 ICE detention centers across the United States.
..... We should all be concerned about the intergenerational damage being done to detainees. As a trauma psychologies who has worked extensively with former prisoners of war and studied the long-term effects of captivity, I see the alarming parallels.
..... The conditions in ICE detention camps are horrendous. Internees report overcrowding and unhygienic conditions, with little edible food and drinking water.
..... Many of them are receiving inadequate health care.
..... According to Human Rights Watch, more than 50 people have died in ICE custody since January 2025. some of the deaths are due to delayed helaht care, others to suicide.
..... Many of the former prisoners of war with whom I worked told me similar stories about their captivity experiences. decades after internment, the men had high rates of medical problems such as tuberculosis, dysentery, peptic ulcers, heart disease and stroke deaths, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
..... Those psychological effects didn't affect only them. five decades later, they were still working to repair their psychological wounds. Many feared they would never feel whole again.
..... In the early 2000s, I conducted a study of former prisoners of war residing in California. They had come home and resumed apparently "normal" lives - marriage, children, etc, - but they still felt along, describing feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
..... Few shared their experiences, fearing that they would burden their partners and that they wouldn't be believed or understood. those with PTSD reported significantly more problems on every measure of intimate relationship functioning. They had higher levels of tension and conflict and engaged in fewer shared activities. They reported lower levels of intimacy and more verbal and physical aggression.

Documenting detainee problems

..... Some of the best research on the effects of captivity on former military service members comes form Brian Engdahl, a psychologist who worked at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center fro 42 years. He, too, sees the similarities between military prisoners and ICE detainees.
..... "It sounds so familiar to what is happening today, [07/24/2026]and the ICE captives may have it even worse," Engdahl told me.
..... In our study published in 2005, he found that a lack of social support was one of the strongest predictors of which former prisoners had PTSD and depression.
..... Engdahl noted that many of ICE's detainees will be deported "to places where they do not know anyone and where they have no support. This is going to inflame their symptoms."
..... Another parallel to ICE's detention camps is he mass incarceration of more than 110,000 Japaneses Americans during world War II.
..... As with war veterans, there were long-term negative psychological and physical effects on these detainees. Nearly 37% had PSTD within six months after they were released, and many continued to have full-blown or sub-threshold symptoms years later.
..... Data also showed that their experiences had negative impacts on their children's ability to connect and communicate. those held in captivity felt uprooted and had problems trusting others and engaging emotionally. they passed that on to their children.

This issue has historical echoes

..... In 1988, the U.S. government under President Ronald Reagan admitted that the internment of Japanese Americans was a grave injustice and offered an official apology and financial reparations to living survivors. That recognition took more than 40 years. For many, it came too late.
..... Two-thirds of the Japanese Americans held in captivity were U.S. citizens, but their citizenship status is not the only thing that makes their mistreatment a stain on our history, citizens or not, the effects of captivity on those who experience it, as well as on their families, are clear.
.... The men, women and children being detained by ICE are experiencing extreme, inescapable psychological and biological hardship. This is massive and sustained trauma, inflicted in the name of making some Americans feel safer.
..... There are actions we all can take to help: reporting ICE activities in our area to local news media, demanding congressional oversight and working to protect the vulnerable in our communities.
..... As a psychologist who conducts research on trauma and treats its survivors, I want these detention centers shut down.
..... The people ICE has detained and their families will be paying a mental, physical and cognitive price for the rest of their lives. Yet those of us who are not swept up in this terrifying dragnet are paying, too: President Donald Trump recently singed a $70 billion immigration funding bill, including $38 billion for ICE.
..... The costs won't stop there. As a nation, we will pay in the from of moral injury, which occurs when individuals carry out, fail to prevent or witness awful events that go against their deeply held morel beliefs.
..... When even those of us who approve of ICE's actions realize this cruelty contradicts our ethical beliefs and our nation's founding documents, we will be deeply pained.
.....When ICE is doing violates the values many of us believing we live by, and the wounds that are inflected as we shad by will haunt us.
..... We have been here before, and it took us four decades to admit we made a grave error. This time, we must not wait to tell the truth we can see with our own eyes.
..... This is wrong, and it must stop.

..... Joan M. Cook PhD, is a clinical psychologist who specializes in research and clinical work with trauma survivors, and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. The views expressed here are her own, not the university's.

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