When Harm Is Routine and Unnamed: Bearing Witness to ICE Violence Against Brown and Black Communities

by Dr. Denise Renye

For many people, the killing of Renee Good has opened a door to grief, outrage, and mistrust of state power. For others, particularly Brown and Black immigrants and their loved ones, this moment does not feel new. It feels familiar.

As a trauma informed psychologist and somatic practitioner, I am attentive not only to what happens, but to what happens inside people when harm is repeated and left unnamed. For decades, ICE enforcement has caused injury that rarely receives sustained national attention. Detention, family separation, medical neglect, deportation, and death have shaped the nervous systems of countless Brown and Black people, often without public acknowledgment or accountability.

This harm is not only contemporary. It is layered onto generations of mistreatment, racialized violence, and state sanctioned control. Fear and vigilance did not begin with ICE. They are inherited through family stories, disrupted attachment, chronic stress, and learned survival strategies. Over time, this history becomes organized in the nervous system itself. The body learns early to anticipate threat, to brace, to stay alert, and to limit ease.

When new violence occurs, it does not land on a neutral system. It activates a long standing memory of danger that has never fully resolved. This makes daily life more taxing and regulation more difficult. What may appear from the outside as anxiety, withdrawal, or mistrust is often the nervous system doing exactly what it was shaped to do in the face of repeated and historic harm. These experiences live not only in policy debates, but in bodies, families, and communities.

When harm becomes routine and unnamed, the psychological impact is profound.

My perspective here is also shaped by direct clinical training and experience. I have been trained by clinicians affiliated with the Bay Area Asylum Mental Health Project and have conducted psychological evaluations for people seeking asylum. This work has involved listening closely to stories of detention, persecution, state violence, and forced displacement, and witnessing how these experiences live in the nervous system long after the events themselves. It has made unmistakably clear that fear, vigilance, and shutdown are not abstract reactions. They are patterned responses to real and repeated threats, often compounded by disbelief, minimization, or institutional denial.

The Weight of Unacknowledged Violence

In clinical work, trauma is not defined only by the event itself. It is shaped by what follows. When deaths in custody, violent raids, or forced separations occur without public recognition, the message absorbed is that some lives are less grievable than others.

For Brown and Black communities, this erasure compounds the original injury. It reinforces a learned expectation that pain must be endured quietly and without witness. Over time, this often shows up as emotional numbing, chronic vigilance, depression, or a deep fatigue that has no clear endpoint. These are not personal deficits. They are intelligent adaptations to persistent threat and invisibility.

From a somatic perspective, unacknowledged trauma frequently settles in the body. Clinically, this can appear as chronic muscle tension, digestive disruption, sleep disturbance, shutdown, irritability, or a constant readiness for danger. When the nervous system learns that harm is likely and help is unreliable, it organizes around survival rather than restoration.

Institutional Violence and the Nervous System

ICE violence does not only affect those directly targeted. It reverberates through attachment bonds, family systems, and generations. Children learn early that safety is conditional. Adults learn to scan, brace, and prepare. Elders carry accumulated grief that has never had space to be metabolized.

Psychologically, this mirrors dynamics seen in abusive relationships. The body registers danger, while authority insists order and necessity. This split between lived experience and official narrative creates disorientation, self doubt, and mistrust of one’s own perception. Over time, it erodes a sense of internal safety.

For many Black and Brown people, ICE violence overlaps with broader systems of policing, incarceration, and surveillance. The result is cumulative trauma that is both personal and political, embodied and historical. In the therapy room, this often shows up not as a single story, but as a nervous system shaped by repeated exposure to uncontrollable threat.

Why Naming This Matters

From a psychological standpoint, healing cannot occur in the absence of truth. When violence is unnamed or minimized, the burden of holding reality falls entirely on those most harmed. Naming patterns of ICE violence against Brown and Black communities is not about comparison or hierarchy of suffering. It is about restoring dignity, accuracy, and coherence.

Acknowledgment itself is regulating. To be seen, believed, and named allows the nervous system to soften slightly. It signals that reality is shared rather than privately endured. This is why public witness matters. This is why collective grief matters. It interrupts isolation and restores relational ground.

Somatic Support for Chronic and Collective Trauma

For those living under ongoing threat or carrying intergenerational trauma, healing is not about returning to a baseline that never existed. Clinically, the work is about building capacity, choice, and moments of rest within a hostile context.

Somatic and embodiment based practices can support this process. Orienting to present moment safety, tracking sensation without judgment, and allowing gentle movement can help the nervous system complete stress responses that have been repeatedly interrupted. These are not techniques for bypassing reality. They are ways of supporting the body so it does not have to carry everything alone.

Equally important is collective embodiment. Gathering, mourning, organizing, ritual, and shared meaning making all support regulation at a level individual work cannot reach. Trauma heals in relationship.

For clinicians, this work requires humility and attunement. It asks us to listen without correcting, to avoid minimizing or rushing meaning making, and to respect the intelligence of survival responses shaped by real conditions. Ethical care is grounded in context, not neutrality.

Since Renee Good’s death, many people have reported an escalation rather than a pause. More armed agents, more visible force, and continued reports of harm have intensified fear across communities. Whether through confirmed losses or the pervasive sense that violence could happen again at any moment, the nervous system does not distinguish between direct impact and credible threat. The presence of heavily armed men in neighborhoods, increased enforcement activity, and the absence of clear accountability create an atmosphere that is terrifying for many, particularly those who are already vulnerable.

For people living under these conditions, helplessness is not an abstract feeling. It is a bodily experience. The sense that there is nowhere to turn, no authority to trust, and no reliable protection often shows up as panic, shutdown, rage, or despair. These responses make psychological sense. When power feels unchecked and unpredictable, the nervous system prepares for the worst.

The violence carried out by ICE against Brown and Black communities is not abstract. It is lived, embodied, and ongoing. The absence of acknowledgment is itself a form of harm.

Bearing witness is a psychological act. It means refusing to let loss disappear into silence. It means recognizing that safety has never been equally distributed and that grief has never been equally sanctioned. It also means committing to care that is rooted in reality rather than denial.

Healing begins when harm is named, when bodies are listened to, and when communities are allowed to grieve what they have endured without being told to move on.