COVID-19 has upended community based participatory research (CBPR) projects across the United States and globally. COVID-19 disproportionately impacts historically disenfranchised communities and communities of color, the very communities that CBPR is meant to engage, elevate, and support. In-person activities that help develop rapport and research protocols, build capacity, conduct collaborative data collection and analysis, disseminate findings to the community, and engage in sustainability planning are an impossible practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this article is to describe the challenges and facilitators of shifting to a virtual/online CBPR protocol with a Massachusetts community disproportionately affected by COVID19, as a means to keep them engaged in the research process and to elevate their experiences, perspectives, and voices during this critical time. We include insights about how to facilitate recruitment and compensate community members, form a community advisory board (CAB), hold CAB meetings, and transition participatory qualitative data collection, analysis, and dissemination to a virtual/online framework.

Since October 2013, US Customs and Border Patrol has apprehended 15,979 families on the Southwest Border of the US. Daily, migrating women and children from Mexico and Central America that qualify for humanitarian parole are released from immigration detention to a humanitarian aid organization in Southern Arizona. After several days in detention facilities, these families arrive tired, hungry, dehydrated, and with minimal direction regarding their final destination, and adherence to the parameters of their parole. Project helping hands (PHHs) utilizes a network of volunteers to provide the women and children with food, water, clothing, hygiene products, hospitality, and legal orientation. The aim of this assessment was to document the experiences of families granted humanitarian parole through the lens of structural vulnerability. Here, we apply qualitative methods to elicit PHH lead volunteer perspectives regarding the migration experience of migrating families. Using inductive analysis, we found six major themes emerged from the qualitative data: reasons for leaving, experience on the journey, dehumanization in detention, family separation, vulnerability, and resiliency. These findings elucidate the different physical and psychological distresses that migrating families from Mexico and Central America experience before, during and after their arrival at the US–Mexico border. We posit that these distresses are a result of, or exacerbated by, structural vulnerability. Structural vulnerability has life-long health implications for a sub-population of young mothers and their children. The number of migrating families who have experienced traumatic events before and during their migration experience continues to expand and thus warrants consideration of mental health surveillance and intervention efforts for these families. More public health research is needed to better understand and combat the health challenges of this growing population.

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The immigration enforcement system today affects different subgroups of Latinos; it reaches beyond the undocumented to immigrants who hold legal statuses and even to the U.S.-born. States have enacted their own enforcement collaboration agreements with federal authorities and thus Latinos may have dissimilar experiences based on where they live. This article examines the effects of enforcement schemes on Latinos’ likelihood of reporting crimes to police and views of law enforcement. It includes documented and U.S-born Latinos to capture the spillover beyond the undocumented, and it is based on four metropolitan areas—Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, and Chicago—to comparatively assess the effects of various enforcement contexts. Empirically, it relies on data from a random sample survey of over 2000 Latinos conducted in 2012 in these four cities. Results show that spillover effects vary by context and legal/citizenship status: Latino immigrants with legal status are less inclined to report to the police as compared to U.S.-born Latinos in Houston, Los Angeles, and Phoenix but not in Chicago. At the other end, the spillover effect in Phoenix is so strong that it almost reaches to U.S.-born Latinos. The spillover effect identified is possible due to the close association between being Latino or Mexican and being undocumented, underscoring the racialization of legal status and of immigration enforcement today.

The 2017 revitalization of the controversial Security Communities program, which requires local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration officials in the United States, has made it urgent to better understand such enforcement programs’ effects on the well-being of Latinas/os, especially the foreign-born. Social isolation from increased immigration enforcement can have significant impacts on economic, social, and health outcomes among Latina/o immigrants and non-immigrants. This article analyzes the gendered impacts of different levels of increased local involvement in immigration enforcement on social isolation, using a survey of over 2000 Latinas/os in four large US cities, all considered to be traditional destinations. Unsurprisingly, respondents reported increased social isolation resulting from local law enforcement’s involvement in immigration enforcement. In contrast to results from previous research, our analysis found that women and men were equally likely to feel socially isolated and that having children led to more social isolation for both women and men. Personal and vicarious experiences with immigration enforcement, as well as living in Phoenix and Houston — two urban areas with the strictest enforcement regimes — were strongly related to social isolation. Our results indicate that local authorities’ increased involvement in immigration enforcement can lead to more social isolation for Latina immigrants, particularly those who have children, aligning their experiences with men’s and, thus, undermining Latinas’ previously recognized role as bridges between their families and social institutions and as community builders.