Joan M. Cook
On July 13, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán 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 agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, an unauthorized migrant from Mexico and father of three U.S. citizens.
These killings reawakened debate over ICE’s aggressive practices, but even when ICE doesn’t kill, the fate of the people it targets is often lengthy detention followed by deportation. As of mid-January, a record 73,000 individuals are 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 psychologist who has worked extensively with former prisoners of war and studied the long-term effects of captivity, I see the alarming parallels. ICE detention centers create long-lasting psychological, physical damage. The conditions in ICE detention camps are horrendous. Internees report overcrowding and unhygienic conditions, with little edible food and drinkable 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 these deaths are due to delayed health care, others to suicide.
Many of the former prisoners of war I worked with told me similar stories about their captivity experiences. Decades after internment, these men had high rates of medical problems like tuberculosis, dysentery, peptic ulcers, heart disease and stroke deaths, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Those psychological effects didn’t only affect 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 alone, 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.
Some of the best research on the effects of captivity on former military service members comes from Brian Engdahl, a psychologist who worked at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center for 42 years. He, too, sees the similarities between military prisoners and ICE detainees.
“It sounds so familiar to what is happening today, and the ICE captives may have it even worse,” Engdahl told me.
In one 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 the mass incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
As with war veterans, there were long-term negative psychological and physical effects on these detainees. Nearly 37% had PTSD within six months after they were released, and many continued to have full-blown or subthreshold 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.
ICE detainment 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.
