Chapter II: Building a Life

March 6, 2025

Clavel Rangel & Katie Scarlett Brandt

“It looks like the jungle,” a third-grader with long black hair says to her teacher during a school trip to the Shedd Aquarium. “But there are bigger rocks there. And there are a lot of dead people. I saw it.”

Of the dozens of children on this field trip, most are Venezuelan and have traveled through a dangerous stretch of jungle — the Darién Gap — between Colombia and Panama to get here. The Shedd’s artificial streams, rocks, and humidity remind the children of their journey. “Did you cross the Darién, too, teacher?” The girl asks.

Many of these conversations happen with the help of Google Translate apps, which the teachers have downloaded on their phones to communicate. None of the children speak English, and they have been placed in a school on the West Side where none of the teachers speak Spanish.

Students from a Chicago Public School on the city’s West Side take a field trip to the Shedd Aquarium. The Shedd’s boulders, water, and humidity reminded many of their trip through the jungle. Credit: Katie Scarlett Brandt

Most of these students arrived in October 2023, overwhelming the front office staff, who did everything they could to meet the demand. An office clerk and a security guard — two of the only Spanish speakers — frantically answered families’ questions, sorted through paperwork parents had brought in sealed plastic bags, and helped place children in the correct grades.

Within two weeks, the school’s enrollment surged by 50%, with more than 100 new students. When staff and parents raised concerns about the influx during local school council meetings, the principal stressed the school’s legal obligation to accept every child under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. The law guarantees school enrollment, transportation, and academic support, regardless of whether students have official records. Historically every year, the U.S. Department of Education has allocated funding to schools for the Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program — $129 million in 2023 and again in 2024.

Students leave Carl Von Linné Elementary School, where more than 100 newcomer students have enrolled since 2022. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

Like many of Chicago Public Schools’ 634 schools, this West Side school was under immense pressure. School leaders knew they had to find ways to meet the children where they were academically but also emotionally. Displaced children have a high risk of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health conditions. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre puts the rate of depression and PTSD among displaced people at 30%.

Researchers have been studying how ongoing conflicts globally — such as in Venezuela, Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan — impact forcibly displaced children’s mental health as they attempt to integrate into new communities.

One review of studies, published in November 2024 in the journal PLOS: Mental Health, looked at ways forced displacement affects healthcare and global health security. Displaced young people are especially unique, the authors write, “because they are the most vibrant, energetic, and dynamic part of the population and form a foundation for a new generation.”

Students line up for the annual Halloween parade at Carl Von Linné Elementary School in Chicago. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

Sharon Hoover, PhD, is a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She also co-directs the National Center for School Mental Health. She stresses that when schools invest in mental health programs for their newcomer students — and for all students — the students become better prepared for college and the workforce.

Campus safety improves, too. “When you put more mental health supports in schools, it actually increases the safety of the campus because it helps to identify challenges early, and certainly helps to identify any threat earlier,” Hoover says. “It improves school climate overall, which leads to more belongingness, more connectedness. And that’s especially true for students coming in from a new community, a new country.”

Hoover speaks from 25 years of experience with the National Center for School Mental Health. “These are not new issues,” she says. “There’s lots of research that says students are going to better succeed in school and in work and in life if they have accessible mental health and education support.”

For forcibly displaced migrants, integrating is about more than fitting in with a culture. It’s about integrating their trauma — what they left behind and why, the experience of leaving, and persecutions faced afresh — into their own life. Consider past generations’ migrations into the U.S. from Europe and Asia. What was buried behind their silence as they folded themselves into their new lives as workers and homemakers? What would happen if a society fully supported migrants as they adjusted to a new life? Can someone successfully integrate into a new society if they haven’t integrated their trauma into their own being?

THE AFTERMATH

In the weeks after families enrolled last fall, the principal started a weekly support group to help new students connect. This was important, the principal felt, because migrant children face challenges that greatly increase their risk of mental health issues. These issues include:

Cultural and language barriers
Discrimination
Financial strain
Instability
Loss
Separation
Social stigmas
Uncertainty

During the first meeting, he asked students, through a visiting translator from the district office, to share what they had experienced on their trips. Quietly at first, a couple of older boys raised their hands; they talked about how tired the walking made them, how hungry. Next, a middle-schooler raised her hand and described the stench of the jungle, the feeling of death all around. Younger students told stories of sitting on their parents’ shoulders, clinging to their foreheads, as they crossed a raging river.

Many said they made it through the jungle in a few days, battling the ever-present dangers of cartels, animals, and the environment.

In an inundated, under-resourced school, everyone felt the growing pains. Staff were overstretched, students from the neighborhood had to adjust abruptly to sharing their space and teachers’ attention, and newly arrived students lacked teachers and counselors who spoke their language.

At least 180 migrants wait in a coastal town in Panama for a boat that will take them to the border with Colombia. This is apparently a new official route to speed up migrants’ return to South America. It bypasses the Darién Gap. Credits: EFE/ Bienvenido Velasco

New students’ general discomfort with being in a strange place, coupled with the stress they had experienced on their journey to the U.S., manifested in a variety of ways in the classroom: hitting, bullying, crying, yelling. And research shows that when teachers feel overburdened, they are more likely to misclassify trauma-driven behaviors as belligerence, which can result in punishments like detentions or suspensions. In fact, during the pandemic, only 65% of educators said they felt comfortable addressing trauma tied to that experience, according to a survey by the American Federation of Teachers.

Hoover says that in thinking about student mental health, planners also need to be thinking about teachers’ and families’ mental health.

“Especially in times of uncertainty, or heightened fear, or just change, it’s really important that we’re taking care of the adults so that they can best take care of the kids,” Hoover says. “Student mental health doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The families and educators they interact with everyday are actually the most instrumental. How they’re doing is highly predictive of how young people are doing.”

In one second-grade class, nearly 30 students each morning crowded onto the room’s center rug, which previously had held only 12. The teacher led the morning meeting in English, and then the Spanish-speaking students began their lessons in a corner of the room.

Newly arrived families in a shelter in Chicago, September 2024. Credit: Clavel Rangel

If there was time left at the end of the class, the children drew. A thoughtful and sensitive 7-year-old named Cris always colored the same picture: his mother’s tombstone. He would tell the group how she had died after a Caesarean section in Venezuela. His birthday.

Since then, Cris has been constantly on the move with his father and two older sisters. They spent a few years in Peru and then Colombia before crossing the Mexico-U.S. border into Texas.

“We have been migrating for about seven years. In those years, my children have stopped living like children, the childhood they should have had. It’s not that they are abnormal, but they are not children who play with dolls or a soccer ball,” says Carl, the father.

Carl is still adjusting to being a widower. His wife’s death divided his life into a before and after. The worsening economic crisis in Venezuela, coupled with depression and political unrest, pushed him to emigrate.

At the time of this conversation, Carl was traveling several hours a day to take his children to school. He had just started working at a grocery store in the city’s north, far from the school, but he felt comfortable with the staff and did not want to disrupt his children’s education yet again. The four of them lived in a single room about 7 miles from the school — a long distance in city traffic.

Cris and his sisters haven’t returned to the school this year. By the time the year began, Carl and his children had moved to Texas. “It’s cheaper here, and there’s more work,” he shared in a WhatsApp voice note in December 2024. The number has since been disconnected.

Mari and Fernanda walk to school in the morning on Chicago’s West Side. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

FINDING BELONGING

Many migrant students have, however, stayed in Chicago. And those who landed at Carl Von Linné Elementary, another West Side public school, found a unique champion in the school’s principal.

One of the new students is a quiet 6-year-old, Fernanda*. She arrived with her adoptive mother, Mari, on a bus from Texas in August 2023. Mari says if it hadn’t been for the school, their lives would not be as good as they are now.

For Mari the transition has been complex. “It was not easy at all to adapt. Arriving with nothing, you don’t know anyone in a shelter, where you have to sleep on the floor. We slept on mattresses on the floor for months,” Mari says. “Thank God Fernanda’s school was a relief.”

A relief, she recalls, because Fernanda felt welcome, even if at first she didn’t want to go to school every day.

“She misbehaved because she didn’t want to go. She wanted to stay here every day, or she would tell me she wanted to go to her grandmother, to her home in Venezuela,” Mari says. It was hard to hear, she recalls. “Little by little, I told her. Everything was little by little.”

Mari, 44, fled Venezuela in April 2023. Her mother had been murdered in 2008, and when the killers finished their prison sentence, they vowed revenge. For Mari, those threats were the final straw.

In 2008, Venezuela’s economic crisis was beginning. Armed violence in the country was peaking. Mari’s brother, then 17 years old, asked for a motorcycle for his birthday.

Mari and her three sisters gathered enough money to surprise him with one. And so it was — the gift was the beginning of misfortune in the family: A few months later, criminals stole the motorcycle, were arrested for theft, and, in revenge, swore to kill Mari’s brother.

Once released, they arrived at the family house looking for Mari’s brother. Not finding him, they murdered her mother in his place.

After picking up her daughter at school, Mari, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, cleans their shared apartment in Chicago. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

Mari sought justice. She fought in court and with the police, managing to get the murderers jailed for 15 years. During that period, her sister and brother-in-law, both suffering from a chronic illness, died. They left Mari their daughter Fernanda, orphaned at just 4 months old.

Fernanda became Mari’s purpose in life.

Mari obtained legal custody and didn’t think twice: She fled the country with Fernanda.

The journey through Colombia, the Darién Gap, Panama, and Mexico, among other countries, was no different from what thousands of forced migrants have experienced on that route. The group was robbed, went without food for long stretches, and feared for their lives.

On the way, Mari asked for forgiveness: “My God, forgive me. If you allowed Fernanda to escape from [the illness that took her parents], how come I’m risking her life here?”

The journey wore on Fernanda, who was tired and hungry. But one promise kept her going. Mari had told her they were going to see Mickey Mouse’s house at Disney World.

The family entered the U.S. after 14 days waiting in Mexico, using parole obtained through the Customs and Border Patrol’s immigration enforcement agency, CBPOne. Then, they boarded a bus to Chicago.

Until then, the CBPOne app was the only way to legally access the United States via land. It became a crucial tool for managing migration on the southern border because it allowed immigration officers to interview migrants at ports of entry in an orderly manner.

A Trump campaign sticker adorns a sign on the border wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Credits: EFE/ Allison Dinner

Since its launch in January 2023 through January 2025, when the Trump administration shut it down, more than 800,000 migrants legally entered the U.S. using this app.

Staff greet Carl Von Linne Elementary Principal Gabriel Parra, right, on Halloween in Chicago. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

ASSIMILATION MEMORIES

High winds and an overcast sky were no match for the spirit inside Von Linné Elementary this past Halloween. With only 20 minutes until parents would start lining the halls for the annual parade, students — dressed as Spiderman, Taylor Swift, NASA astronauts, and more — wiggled in their seats and counted down the minutes with musical chairs.

In the front office, Principal Gabriel Parra — dressed as himself in a black pullover sweater and dress pants — hoisted two large boxes of gummy candies into his arms before making rounds to the classrooms.

This year, many of the newcomer students are now in their second year within Chicago Public Schools, gaining a better grasp of language and integrating into American culture. They still carry the memories of their journeys, but the students at Von Linné, at least, have Parra to help them through.

Four decades earlier, Parra was experiencing his own first Halloween in the U.S. His mother had worked for an American company in Venezuela, and when the company offered to relocate her, she immigrated to Chicago with Parra, then 12, and his 2-year-old sister. Parra enrolled in sixth grade at Nixon Elementary School in the Hermosa neighborhood in October 1983.

“I’ll never forget it,” he says now. “I spoke no English, knew very little about American culture. I had no idea what Halloween was, and I see kids dressed up in their costumes. I’m thinking, ‘Where did you bring me, Mom?’”

Carl Von Linné Elementary Principal Gabriel Parra watches students play on the playground after school. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

A few weeks later, Parra was caught up in and confused by the celebration of another new-to-him holiday: Thanksgiving, or as his mom pronounced it, San Giving — Saint Giving.

Those assimilation memories have stuck with him. He remembers conversations with school administrators who wanted to hold him back a grade, but he fought for himself. “I knew the content, the math. What I knew of math was so much more than what they knew here,” he says. “But I lacked the language.”

He also lacked social connections. Other Spanish-speaking immigrants at the time were mostly coming from Mexico and Puerto Rico. They typically had built-in communities of family and friends who had made the trek earlier.

Students’ writing about why they like being bilingual. Responses include: I can communicate with many people, I can travel to other places and teach people, I can learn a lot and count in two languages. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

“I always felt that sense of loneliness because I had no one to share my culture. I remember thinking to myself many times that I belong nowhere,” Parra says.

Parra couldn’t have known it at the time, but he would be exactly where he belonged a few decades later, when his own journey would profoundly connect him with hundreds of Venezuelan families in similar situations. And as the current asylum seekers settle into life in the U.S., community building proves to be part of the solution. While many schools in this moment have lacked a depth of resources and guidance, Parra is building both.

THE FIRST ARRIVALS

The calls came first from the Chicago Park District and Chicago Public Schools. It was May 2023, and the city was converting the field house at Brands Park into a shelter for migrant families. Dozens of children would need to enroll in elementary school.

How would their arrival impact the school? Parra wondered. What resources would the school need?

Though the crisis was daunting, Parra didn’t look away. When the shelter opened, he walked over with a team from Linné to introduce himself. Shelter administrators led him to an open gym, filled with families and children running down the aisles between numbered cots.

“It broke my heart to see that,” Parra says. “These are my people. It’s not just an understanding of what’s happening in the country and why they’re here, but understanding what it’s like to be an immigrant.”

A sign saying Bienvenidos! — welcome In Spanish — hangs over the main hallway in Carl Von Linné Elementary. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

Parra started by introducing himself to the families, and explaining that he and the team had come to enroll children in school. Then he revealed that he too was an immigrant, from Caracas. At that, hundreds of people stood up, cheering. Their reaction gave Parra chills.

He wouldn’t understand the significance of that moment until later.

Initially, 53 new students enrolled at Linné — a school of 640 at the time. Now, more than 100 new arrival students have enrolled.

On the students’ first day of school in May 2023, Linné staff went to the shelter and walked the children to school. Parents lined up along the sidewalk, cheering them on. Nearly two years later, many of those first students remain at the school, even if their housing has shifted across the city.

One family during last school year found a home on the South Side, resulting in a two-hour commute to school each morning. Rebecca Ford-Paz, PhD, a child psychologist at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, has seen this happen often. Many students don’t return to their initial schools after they change shelters or find housing in other parts of the city.

Once families transfer shelters or find housing, they often move to another side of the city, “sometimes in a school where there are no Spanish speakers or in a neighborhood where there are no Spanish speakers. It’s just a recipe for school dropout.”

At Linné, Parra talked with the mother who had just moved to the South Side, explaining how difficult the trek would be, especially during winter.

“Really?” He recalls her saying. “I walked from South America, through the Darién Gap, to the United States. This is a piece of cake.”

SIGNIFICANT TRAUMA

Even from their first steps in the U.S., Fernanda and Mari held onto the idea of returning to Venezuela, that their time here would be only temporary.

Eventually, though, Mari decided to request permanent asylum.

Mari, left, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, picks up her daughter from school at Carl Von Linné Elementary School in Chicago. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

“I have always been very optimistic. I have always thought that whatever happens, the situation will change in Venezuela,” Mari says. “But now I have lost the motivation and the hope that [the political system] can change. With nothing left inside me, I would like to be in my country, but it is not possible.”

She thanks God that they made it here and for Fernanda’s education. “Every time I get homesick or complain about going back, I see [Fernanda], and I feel at peace,” Mari says.

A young girl, an asylum seeker from Venezuela, brushes her teeth before bed, in her shared apartment in Chicago. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

In time, and on their own terms, many of the parents and students at Von Linné shared stories from their journeys. The school’s social-emotional learning team developed a questionnaire to gather more individualized data.

The information created a clearer picture of their emotional trauma. Students shared stories of having to jump over dead bodies, of criminal gangs looking to rob and exploit them along the way.

Parra remembers the afternoon that one mother sat in his office crying. She told him about the Haitian woman she’d seen crossing a particularly treacherous river in the jungle. The woman had held tightly to her baby, but a strong current pulled the child from her grasp. A few miles ahead, the family saw the woman again — hanging from a tree.

“This is significant trauma for families and children,” Parra says. “We need to focus on the social-emotional side of this, but how do we do that? Their academics are so behind too, you don’t want to lose time there.”

Parra meets with other Chicago Public Schools principals, sharing Linné’s successes and struggles, and how the school has been not only acclimating but helping students thrive.

It’s a tall order. In her work, Ford-Paz has noticed that schools aren’t consistently making appropriate accommodations for students who need more support than a mainstream classroom offers. Sometimes, she says, the schools aren’t listening to the families who share their child’s autism diagnosis. Other times, they’re not receiving adequate social-emotional support “because the thinking is that they’re just newcomers, they’ll adjust,” Ford-Paz says.

Rosa Bramble, founder and director of Venezuelan Alliance New York, in her office, where she works to support immigrants in NYC. Credit: Nathalie Sayago

BUILDING COMMUNITY

The Venezuelan families who have most successfully acclimated to life in the U.S. tend to have one key factor in common: the support of other Venezuelans already established in the U.S. Other Latino communities with a long history of forced migration to the U.S. have been doing exactly that for decades.

Clinician Rosa Maria Bramble-Caballero founded the Venezuelan Alliance for Community Support, Inc. in 2022. The Alliance provides supportive services including trauma counseling for individuals and families and also writes psychosocial evaluations to support asylum cases and other immigration categories.

By 2010, the Venezuelan population was still small in New York City — only 0.1% of the city’s total population according to the Census from that year. The 2020 Census reported 17,734 Venezuelans in New York City, or 0.2%.

Then, in 2022, Operation Lone Star buses started arriving unannounced and uncoordinated from Texas. The city didn’t know how to respond, nor how long the buses would keep coming.

Bramble-Caballero said it was important to let people know they were not alone, especially for migrants like Venezuelans who don’t have an anchor community in NYC. “The idea was to make sure they understood that they were in a city where they had rights and had the right to exercise them,” Bramble-Caballero says.

At first, there was a lot of solidarity, but as the buses kept coming, city resources — and everyone trying to help — became overwhelmed.

Members of the Illinois-Venezuelan Alliance address migrants at a shelter in Chicago. September, 2024. Credit: Clavel Rangel

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Illinois-Venezuelan Alliance was running workshops inside shelters to prevent violence, educate around city culture, and help newly arrived asylum seekers understand their rights and duties in the city. The group focuses on connecting with women.

The city’s crisis reconnected Ana Gil, a Venezuelan teacher living in Chicago, with her purpose. “There is no one who can understand a Venezuelan woman better than a Venezuelan woman,” Gil says.

That’s why they have been giving workshops to migrant women. Cilema Borjes, from Illinois-Venezuelan Alliance and a Venezuelan teacher, is one of the facilitators of these workshops. «The workshops we give help you focus, because many are still assimilating where they are, their dreams, what they were told they were going to be and it’s not true. They have the trauma of everything they went through. Although our workshops don’t replace a psychologist, they do help you focus because we listen to them.»

Venezuelan teacher Cilema Borjes, from Illinois-Venezuelan Alliance, outside one of the church-based shelters where she offers workshops and support groups for migrant women. Credit: Clavel Rangel

From a mental health lens, challenges crop up when everyone around you is feeling the same pain you are, because that pain becomes the norm. “They don’t see it as a problem. They just see it as this is life; this is what it’s like,” Ford-Paz says.

Seeking out mental health support in that circumstance doesn’t jump to the forefront. In fact, many countries don’t have the same concepts of mental health that Americans do. “Some cultures don’t have a word for depression or post-traumatic stress disorder,” Ford-Paz says. “Unless there’s some sort of raising awareness that things can be better, and there’s help available, there’s going to be limited engagement in our traditional systems of care.”

For many migrants, mental health services weren’t available in Venezuela. Mental health care wasn’t something that people, especially those in under-resourced communities, sought out.

Mental health stigmas affect utilization, too. “Often people will want to try everything else before they would ever go see their doctor about it. So they’ll go to their clergy person, and they’ll get a cleansing. Or they’ll go to the botánica, or see a curandero,” Ford-Paz says. “There’s a number of things that are culturally more congruent and more familiar that they’re going to exhaust before they would consider talking to a mental health professional.”

When their children started school in the U.S., most newcomer parents didn’t know they could advocate for mental health support.

“There’s a lack of familiarity with our system of care here that it’s even an option, or that there are social workers in school buildings,” Ford-Paz says. “People don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know how to ask or where to ask for help.”

She and her team want to make mental health care more readily accessible in spaces where migrants already exist.

The view outside Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, one of the places, along with schools and churches, where the Trump administration has given ICE agents clearance to arrest people. Credit: Katie Scarlett Brandt

Now, though, those exact spaces — hospital clinics, schools, shelters, and churches — are also points of fear. In the days immediately after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, his promises about tracking down immigrants in Chicago are being fulfilled to the letter. The challenges for organizations trying to help has only grown.

Hoover stresses that programs that are helping students and families transition to new communities need to persevere. “It’s really important not to abruptly stop mental health services and to make sure that our health settings are accessible and that people are not fearful of getting support,” Hoover says.

Because when people fear going to school or their medical appointments, everyone stands to suffer.

At Von Linné, Parra thinks of his mother, who led him to the U.S. hoping for a better life.

“I’m grateful that she instilled those values and those morals in me, that she prepared me to thrive and be able to achieve my dreams,” he says. “I never imagined that I would be sitting here as the principal of this school, but it happened.”

He holds the same hope for his children — and for those who have traveled so far with dreams of education and a future. “If they are going to embrace this wonderful country that is America, whatever they learn here, the foundation they received here at the Linné School sets them up for success so that they can be good citizens and embrace the American dream, which I am living.”

An asylum-seeking girl does schoolwork at her home in Chicago. Image has been edited for security. Credit: Joel Angel Juárez

For her next birthday, Fernanda dreams of going on a trip to “Mickey Mouse’s house” — the same dream she clung to as she crossed the Darién Gap. Mari dreams too, of studying law or nursing. In March, she was still saving up for both, or whatever may come next.