“Family is Family Forever”: Perceptions of Family Changes After Deportation

Abstract

Around 4.5 million U.S. citizen children are at risk of being separated from a parent due to deportation. This means that many citizen children who have a deported parent are growing up with fragmented families and long-distant parents. These children are often in the care of their remaining family members. Therapists need to understand what remaining family members can do to ease the transition for children and help them to make sense of their parent being deported. A retrospective lens is employed to explore adult experiences of their family post-deportation. Findings show that family went through a reorganization process after parental deportation which impacted how the child understood the deportation and affected the child’s perceptions and experiences of their parental loss. Implications are offered through the Family Resiliency Framework.