The Ties that Bind: How Interpersonal Connections Shape Latinx Immigrant Health

The last 10–15 years have witnessed a growing mental health emergency at the United States’ (U.S.) southern border, as large numbers of Latinx families and children flee violence and seek asylum (Venta, 2019), a right that is protected by U.S. law, despite being barred at the time of writing (Martínez-Beltrán, 2025). While it is critical to note that heterogeneity among Latinx immigrants is the norm—with variation in terms of modes of travel, migration experiences, trauma exposure, and post-migration adjustment to life in the U.S. (DeBrabander & Venta, 2022)—empirical evidence of staggering rates of trauma exposure in asylee children (Venta & Mercado, 2019) and parents (Mercado, Venta, Henderson, & Pimentel, 2021) now dominate the recent scientific literature. Among recently immigrated parents traveling with children, for instance, all had experienced a significant traumatic event, with 70% reporting crime-related violence and 46% surviving sexual or physical trauma (Mercado, Venta, et al., 2019). Across youth samples, approximately 60% of recently immigrated Latinx children and adolescents experience clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms, with an average rate of symptoms that exceeds previously published clinical cutoffs (Venta & Mercado, 2019). Indeed, the mean level of posttraumatic distress is 161% higher in Latinx immigrant children and 204% higher in Latinx immigrant young adults than in non-immigrants (Venta & Mercado, 2019).

The mental health of immigrants alone warrants attention to the health of asylum-seekers, and even greater concern is warranted by the reality that mental health symptoms are associated with physical health, work/school, and caregiving difficulties in Latinx immigrant families (Mercado, Venta, Henderson, & Pimentel, 2019) and account for a sizable portion of the noncommunicable disease burden worldwide (Meylan, Schmidt, & Alam, 2023). The effects of immigration enforcement actions—like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, detentions, and deportations that have dominated recent headlines in the U.S. (e.g., Maalimisaq, 2026)—on self-rated physical health have been demonstrated across thousands of respondents with a dosing effect such that each additional experience of enforcement is associated with poorer health (Young, Chen, Sudhinaraset, Saadi, Kietzman, & Wallace, 2023). Indeed, enforcement actions and policies cultivate fear in immigrant communities, leading to underutilization of health services and negative physical health outcomes (Rhodes et al., 2015), and the fear itself acts as a toxic stressor, dysregulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and nervous system, leading to increases morbidity and mortality that Boen and colleagues call the “bodily scars of legal violence,” (Boen, Graetz, Venkataramani, & Ortiz, 2025).

With an international team of students and colleagues, we¹ have interviewed hundreds of recently immigrated Latinx adults, adolescents, and children about both the adversities they have faced and the sources of strength that drive their resilience. While no two families are alike, they share many of the same adversities and many of the same deep wells of strength and resilience. In many of the stories we have heard, the traumas that most affect people are those that are interpersonal in nature, and those are often embedded in the asylum seeking and immigration experiences themselves. Among the horrific events that stand out in these narratives– narratives of kidnapping, rape, starvation, walking among corpses, and other atrocities– one that asylees consistently cite as affecting their health is family separation. For many immigrant families, family separation actually begins in their home countries. Data from a small, descriptive study of immigrant teens in the Southwestern U.S. (Venta et al., 2020) document the prototypic experience of many asylum seeking families– fathers often leave the home country first, leaving behind the rest of the family including very young children to establish a foothold in the U.S. Mothers may follow, finding that the family still cannot make ends meet or the situation is so dangerous that everyone needs to flee. If the children follow, they often come as unaccompanied immigrant minors who are reunited with one of their parents, or another immigration sponsor, in the U.S.

In our data, separation is the norm, not the exception. Among recently immigrated adolescents, 31% experienced separation from just their father, plus 17% that experienced separation from both parents—totaling nearly half of the sample experiencing separation from a primary caregiver (Venta et al., 2020). Results indicated that children were quite young when these separations occurred, around 5–6 years old, with the separation lasting an average of 6–7 years. The range was large, upwards of a decade in many cases. Our qualitative data on families who have experienced reunification shows that these disrupted relationships– the guilt that parents carry and the resentment and abandonment that children carry— have profound effects on the entire family’s mental health (Venta, Brabeck, et al., 2021). Recent collected data from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border tell the same story—family separation is tragically common among asylum seeking families and its association with mental health cannot be ignored (Venta et al., 2025). Data from other research groups echo links between family separation and mental health (Naseh, Zeng, Ahn, Cohen, & Rfat, 2024) and link family separation due to migration to physical health, with separated children having more frequent and chronic illnesses in addition to mental health concerns (Heymann, Flores-Macias, Hayes, Kennedy, Lahaie, & Earle, 2009).

We also see other forms of family separation occurring both at the U.S./Mexico border and within our borders every day. Families trying to seek refuge in the U.S. who are unable to get an asylum appointment in the U.S., for instance, may reach levels of desperation where they self-separate from their children, sending them across the border by themselves (Mercado et al., 2021). As paths to legal migration and the right to seek asylum continue to narrow from already challenging levels, mothers and fathers, no different in sprit from any of us, are sending their children across an international border alone, because they find themselves unable to provide for their basic safety through any legal immigration channel (Mercado et al., 2021). Within our borders, we hear and have published the stories of asylum-seeking families separated and detained on the U.S. side of the border (Venta et al., 2024). That is, there seems to be a common practice of detaining and processing fathers separately from mothers and children as they seek asylum and then deporting part of the family while admitting another part of the family to the U.S. This practice undermines the importance of family connections for the health of parents and children alike and ignores the important roles that fathers play in Latinx mental health (Venta, Walker, et al., 2021). As we see more and more headlines about families torn apart by immigration enforcement within the U.S., with laws and practices that fail to treat the family as a unit, our concern for American public health must grow as well given more than four decades of data linking family and caregiver bonds to mental and physical health via pathways of inflammation, stress and cortisol, and cardiometabolic vulnerability (see Ehrlich & Cassidy, 2019 for a review).

Just as interpersonal factors, like family separation and interpersonal trauma, confer risk for health problems in immigrants, we also see that interpersonal connections can be sources of strength and resilience. Not surprisingly, attachment security in immigrant groups– for instance among recently immigrated Latinx adolescents in the U.S.– is associated with mental health outcomes across the board– showing negative relations with emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, peer problems, and positive relations with prosocial behavior and resilience (Venta et al, 2018)—and with self-reported physical outcomes like life satisfaction and physical health (Shelton, Wang, & Carbajal, 2020). In immigrant youth, attachment security is acting as a cross-cutting transdiagnostic protective factor associated with mental health (echoing, for example, Herstell et al., 2021) and positive health outcomes (as in prior research, e.g., McWilliams & Bailey, 2010), despite the reality that these children all experienced some migration-related separation. That is, we are seeing are the robust effects of attachment security for health and the resilience of these family bonds even in the context of extreme adversity.

We find the same results in two replication samples, large samples of Latin American young adults both living in Latin America and immigrants to the U.S. (Venta et al., 2021). Again, attachment security is significantly associated with positive mental health outcomes across the board. In fact, we see that these attachment relationships are so important that they statistically buffer or moderate what would otherwise be a strong and positive relation between trauma exposure and important outcomes. In the context of self-injury and suicide in immigrant youth, for instance, we find that under conditions of low attachment security, the with trauma is strong and positive, but attenuated, to the point of non-significance, under conditions of higher attachment security; Walker & Venta, 2023). With regard to positive mental health outcomes, too, resilience is positively supported by attachment security in trauma exposed immigrant adolescents, particularly maternal communication (Cuervo, Bautista, & Venta, 2024).

The positive effects of interpersonal belonging among Latinx immigrant families are not constrained to the context of attachment security but rather seem to be about interpersonal support more broadly. In a large sample of Latinx young adults– more than 1000— for instance, results indicated that the cultural value of familismo, which includes endorsing the view that “parents should teach their children that the family always comes first,” plays a significant role in buffering the effects of discrimination on mental health (Walker, Cuervo, & Venta, 2022). Our lab has done some work to try and unpack how these different interpersonal variables relate to immigrant health and our findings suggest that Latinx immigrants may be particularly effective when it comes to utilizing interpersonal sources of strength. The results of analyses in a large sample, nearly 600 Latino young adults, showed two different paths by which to arrive at experiences of perceived social support (Abate, Bailey, & Venta, 2022). One path was via attachment security– when attachment security was high, so was social support, an unsurprising finding given expansive literature on attachment theory. But when attachment security was low (which would normally be considered to be a context of interpersonal risk for mental health problems) that cultural value of familismo compensated in the conferral of social support.

Moving outside of the family, our work with recently immigrated youth points to very similar findings regarding the role of interpersonal belonging at school. That is, we see negative relations between peer attachment with mental health and peer problems as well as positive relations with prosocial behavior and resilience (Venta et al., 2018). The same pattern of findings emerges when considering school engagement broadly, rather than peer relations specifically. Finally, interpersonal belonging in a very broad sense, that is, a sense of belonging in the United States, again carries statistical weight in relation to mental health. In a study looking at a large sample of immigrant college students, we found support a vague sense of interpersonal belonging. Using just one item that we wrote ourselves, probing a subjective sense of belonging in the U.S., we found that among undocumented young adults or those with tenuous immigration status (like under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy), a sense of belonging (or lack of) was a significant predictor of mental health problems, particularly suicide related thoughts and behaviors, more so than actual physical danger and legal threats of deportation (Venta, Long, Mercado, Garcini, & Cadenas, 2022).

Pulling this research together, a picture emerges in which a complex tapestry of interpersonal belonging– woven by attachment to primary caregivers, communication with parents, cultural values that center the family, school engagement, peer networks, and belongingness within a national zeitgeist— explains Latinx immigrant resilience in spite of tremendous adversity. An image comes into focus of a migrant family, huddled together under a beautifully woven, colorful, but worn tapestry reflecting their culture, their love, and their hardships. That tapestry makes the migration journey with them and shrouds them as they find their footing in the U.S. Every one us, then, is a part of that interpersonal tapestry. Immigrants are woven into the very fabric of the U.S., they play with our children in school, they ride next to us on the subway, and they author the very articles we read in scientific journals. Their health is not just dependent on them because there is no them or their health, there’s only us and is our health. The question then becomes, where can we cultivate belonging that will heal us all?