#DepthOfMyIdentity : The Complexity of Minority Mental Health & Immigration
A note before we begin: This post discusses the mental health impact of immigration enforcement, including recent events in Minnesota and the broader region. If you are currently in crisis or need immediate support, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. For immigration legal resources in Minnesota and North Dakota, see the resource section further down in this post.
Every July, we observe Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, established by Congress in 2008 and named in honor of an author, advocate, and co-founder of NAMI who devoted her life to destigmatizing mental health care in communities of color. This year's theme is #DepthOfMyIdentity: an invitation to go beyond the surface of who we are, to sit with the full, layered complexity of identity, and to recognize that mental health cannot be separated from the context in which people live their lives.
This year, that context includes a great deal that is hard to name and harder to carry.
In recent months, immigrant communities across Minnesota, the Upper Midwest, and the country have experienced an unprecedented surge in immigration enforcement activity. For many families, individuals, adoptees, and folx navigating intersectional identities in rural and urban settings alike, this is not just a news story happening somewhere; it’s something they are actively navigating and trying to survive. While it might be safer to write a post about minority mental health in July 2026 without acknowledging what is hollowing out our communities, it would be performative at best, and at Dachtler Therapy, we cannot grow together if we are not rooted together.
So we commit to holding all of it — the month's purpose, the present moment, and the people navigating both.
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What and Why This Matters
National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month was started by Bebe Moore Campbell, an American author, advocate, and co-founder of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). It seeks to foster dialogue and eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health in minority communities, promote cultural sensitivity, improve access to quality mental health care, and encourage open discussions about mental health. In 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives officially recognized July as "Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month." Her work was rooted in an urgent truth: mental health care systems in this country were not built with communities of color in mind, and the consequences of that gap are real and ongoing. While nearly half of White Americans receive mental healthcare when needed, only 31% of Black and Hispanic individuals get the same support. The barriers are many: cost, insurance coverage, geographic access, a shortage of culturally humble providers, and the weight of stigma that operates fluidly in different communities.
It’s important to state that membership in historically excluded communities does not inherently create mental health vulnerabilities, but it’s the actual lived experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and racial trauma associated with society's treatment of these groups that contribute to mental health challenges. The problem is not identity. The problem is what identity has been made to cost in a society that does not always honor it. This year's theme, #DepthOfMyIdentity, asks us to move past surface-level awareness and into the specificity of lived experience. Identity is layered and evolving, shaped by everything a person has lived through, survived, and is still becoming.
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What Immigrant Communities Are Carrying Right Now
It is not possible to write about minority mental health in our region this summer without naming what has happened in Minnesota, and what continues to reverberate outward into rural communities, including here in Grand Forks, ND, and our neighboring city, East Grand Forks, MN. Operation Metro Surge was an operation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that began in December 2025, initially targeting the Twin Cities and later expanding to all of Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security called it "the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out." The scale of harm was significant and documented. In one month alone, the City of Minneapolis estimated at least $203.1 million in community and economic impact, representing losses to the economy, community livelihoods, mental health, and food and shelter security. An estimated 76,000 people (mostly immigrants, refugees, American Indian/Native American, and Black/African American and people of color) needed urgent assistance.
The mental health effects were immediate and severe. Mental health service providers reported a 50% reduction in client contact during the operation, at a time when the need arguably became more pressing, because of the chokehold that leaving home might mean not coming back. School-based mental health visits fell 22% compared to the same period in the prior year. Minneapolis Public Schools served more than 441,000 fewer meals and snacks from January through March, and school-based clinics saw a 47% decline in medical visits. Those numbers represent real children, real families…real people who were already navigating the weight of minority stress, immigration status, and cultural isolation; now carrying additional acute trauma.
Children in immigrant communities already carry a heavier mental health burden before enforcement expanded, navigating new cultures, languages, and environments while managing past trauma and discrimination. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that those who experience a parent's deportation face more than double the odds of developing PTSD. The effects ripple outward, with children in surrounding communities reporting higher levels of depression, anxiety, and trauma. And the effects are not contained to urban centers. The fear, the hypervigilance, the withdrawal from services ripple into rural communities across North Dakota and Minnesota, where immigrant and refugee families have built deep roots, where neighbors know each other, and where the absence of a person or family is felt by an entire community.
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Not All Immigrants Are Adoptees. Not All Adoptees Are Immigrants. And When They Are, It Matters.
This is distinction matters and is worth saying plainly: immigrant identity and adoptee identity are not the same thing, and conflating them erases the specificity of each. Many immigrants came to this country by choice or necessity, fleeing violence, instability, or persecution, and carry a clear, rooted connection to their country of origin, language, culture, and community. Their immigration status, whatever it is, does not determine the validity of their identity or their sense of belonging, nor does the current political and enforcement climate change who they are. It only changes what they are being made to risk for simply living their lives as our neighbors. Many adoptees, particularly Transnational Transracial Adoptees (TTAs), arrived in this country as infants or young children, often without memory of their birth country, without fluency in their birth language, and without continuous access to their culture of origin. Their relationship to that identity is often fragmented, contested, and still being assembled, and are frequently perceived as immigrants by others. Many TTAs have experienced navigating comments about where they're "really from," while simultaneously feeling disconnected from the very communities to which they are assumed to belong.
When someone is both an adoptee and an immigrant, or when they hold legal citizenship while their family members do not, the layers compound in ways that are particular and significant. The question of belonging becomes multi-directional: not belonging fully to the birth community, not always belonging fully to the adoptive family's cultural context, and navigating a political climate that questions the legitimacy of presence itself. Identity, at its depth, is not just about where you come from. It is about where you are allowed to feel at home, and what it costs you when that permission is revoked. The psychological impact on adoptees who are people of color navigating increased enforcement activity in the region, even those with full citizenship, is real. Racial profiling does not stop to check documentation status, and hypervigilance does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. The trauma of watching one's community under siege is not a lesser form of trauma because your passport looks different.
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What #DepthOfMyIdentity Asks of All of Us
The theme of this year's observance is an invitation, and we take it seriously. The depth of my identity suggests that there is more to who we are than what is visible on the surface…more than documentation status, more than a single cultural affiliation, more than a diagnosis, a country of origin, or a family story. It also acknowledges that for BIPOC individuals, minority stress (the cumulative psychological toll of navigating marginalization, discrimination, and systemic inequity) is a clinical reality with documented health consequences. This month is a time to focus on the unique strengths and challenges that Black, Indigenous, and people of color face when it comes to mental health.
For mental health providers, #DepthOfMyIdentity is also a call to examine our own practices. Are we meeting clients at the full intersectionality of their experience, or are we seeing (and subsequently diagnosing) them through a single lens? Are we creating spaces where immigrant clients, adoptees, folx with intersecting racial and cultural identities, and people navigating enforcement-related trauma can speak freely, without having to minimize parts of themselves or code-switch to be understood? This is not just a burden for our clients to navigate, but one in which our profession calls us to hold for the good of the client.
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Community Resources
Therapy is one form of support. It is not the only form, and for many people right now, it may not be the most urgent one. If you or someone you know is navigating an immigration-related crisis or needs immediate support, the following regional resources may help:
Immigration Legal & Community Support
Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM): Free immigration legal representation for low-income immigrants and refugees in Minnesota and North Dakota
Immigrant Rapid Response Fund (MN): Coalition fund supporting immediate needs of targeted immigrant communities
Forks Area Aid Network (FAAN): A community mutual aid partnership in the greater Grand Forks area, strengthening neighborhood connections through shared resources, trust, and local decision-making.
UND School of Law Immigration Clinic: Located on campus, law students and faculty may provide legal assistance on certain immigration matters. Call 701-777-2104
Global Friends Coalition: Located on Demers Avenue, they are a vital local resource offering integration services, volunteer mentors, and consultation. They are a DOJ-accredited organization that can assist with immigration forms. Call 701-746-8233 or email immigration@gfcoalition.org
New Hope For Immigrants: Located nearby in East Grand Forks, they provide social support, cultural navigation, and economic empowerment for immigrant families. Call 612-542-0040.
COPAL MN: Hotline support for Latine families impacted by enforcement.
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988. Available 24/7, free, multilingual
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
National Immigrant Justice Center: Visit their website for downloadable Know Your Rights Materials outlining exactly what to do if ICE agents come to your home, workplace, or in public.
The Advocates for Human Rights: This regional organization provides free legal help to people in immigration detention and can refer you to specialized attorneys.
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The Depth of It
National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month asks us to go deeper than awareness and asks us to actually sit with the full picture of what BIPOC individuals, immigrant communities, adoptees, and folx navigating multiple historically excluded identities are carrying. The depth of identity, this year’s theme, is not a metaphor but a clinical and lived reality. Identity is shaped by history, by culture, by trauma, by belonging, by loss, by who was allowed to claim you and who wasn't. Getting to know someone at that depth so that they may be seen is what makes healing possible.
If you have been thinking about reaching out, because something is heavy, because the world feels frightening right now, because you've never had a space where all of you was welcome, we want you to know this practice is one of those spaces. You don't have to arrive with everything figured out. You just have to arrive.
Whenever you're ready, we’re here.
