This manuscript examines how personally knowing a deportee and/or undocumented immigrant affects the mental health of Latina/o adults. Utilizing a new survey sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico (n=1,493), we estimate a series of logistic regressions to understand how personal connections to immigrants are affecting the mental health of Latinos using stress process theory. Our modeling approach takes into consideration the socio-political, familial, cultural, and personal contexts that make up the Latina/o experience, which is widely overlooked in data-sets that treat Latinos as a homogeneous ethnic group. Our findings suggest that knowing a deportee increases the odds of having to seek help for mental health problems. The significance of this work has tremendous implications for policy makers, health service providers, and researchers interested in reducing health disparities among minority populations especially under a new administration, which has adopted more punitive immigration policies and enforcement.
Keywords: Latino populations; deportations; health disparities; mental health; survey research.