MD Vote 2024

Election season heightens stress for Maryland Latino community

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WASHINGTON - The 2024 election is dividing the Latino community, both in terms of which candidate to support and because anti-immigrant rhetoric inherently pits people against each other.

And for those navigating the United States as an immigrant, election season can add to the stress of daily life.

Latinos (people from Latin America and their descendants) and Hispanics (people from Spanish-speaking countries and their descendants) are the second-fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. electorate. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about one in eight Marylanders are Hispanic. Nearly 40% of Maryland's Hispanic population is eligible to vote, according to the Pew Research Center.

Some young Latino voters in Maryland are excited about the election, according to Crisaly De Los Santos, the youth program and education manager for the Latino advocacy organization CASA. CASA in Action, a sister organization, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential race.

De Los Santos said young voters she works with in Baltimore City and Baltimore County are looking forward to representing their families, who may not be able to vote because of their immigration status, at the polls.

“It’s interesting because we actually have the students starting the conversations on their own… ‘Oh, now I'm able to represent my parents. Now I have a voice, and I have a say in this elections,’” De Los Santos told Capital News Service.

But De Los Santos also said conservative political attacks on immigrants are frightening Latino students she works with.

“It has an impact on their everyday life. It's like, ‘Oh, am I scared to go out? Am I scared to do this?’” she said.

CNS spoke with eight immigrants from Latin America who live in Maryland and two health professionals who work with the Latino community. Interviewees spoke about how this election cycle has impacted their lives and mental health.

For example, Nicole Ramirez-Vasquez, an immigration supervising case manager at Esperanza Center, an immigrant resource organization in Baltimore, said election season can cause tension and feelings of guilt and sadness in families where members are both documented and undocumented.

“And there's always that mentality, like, ‘Oh, like, it may not happen to me, it may happen to others,’” she said.

She said her clients, many of whom are undocumented, are scared to reach out for services during this election cycle for fear of attracting attention from immigration authorities.

Mental health is the top health concern for the local Latino community according to Dr. Sarah Polk. She is a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of Centro SOL, an organization that offers group therapy programs and supports the local Latino community in accessing health care.

Polk said politics don’t often come up directly in doctor’s visits and they shouldn’t.

Nevertheless, she said she has seen political policies affect the health care Latino and immigrant communities receive. During Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, Polk said she had to be careful where she sent her patients' prescriptions for them to pick up because some of her patients were scared to go to locations where immigration officials had been spotted.

“During Trump's first presidency, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) would patrol the parking lot of our local Walgreens,” she said. “While current politics were not relevant to whether or not the child had an ear infection, they were pretty relevant to whether that child was going to be able to be treated.”

Polk said this election cycle is taking a toll on her Latino staff and clients that can’t be undone.

“I guess I don't know if it's sadness or being demoralized, like… even if the outcome of the election is not Trump's return to power, there's just a harm in all this racist and violent rhetoric,” she said.

At a Trump campaign rally Sunday, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe caused a furor after calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and saying Latinos “love making babies” in a crude joke. This comes after Trump said at a rally a week ago that the United States has become a “garbage can for the world” because of the way the Biden-Harris administration has handled immigration.

Yet other Latinos like Alfonso Talavera, head of the Maryland Republican Party’s Hispanic-Latino Outreach Committee, believe the Republican agenda is better for Latinos – including policies from Trump’s presidency.

Today, Talavera works in real estate in Silver Spring, Maryland. He built a life in the United States after fleeing Nicaragua as a political refugee in the 1980s. He said he was able to quickly gain asylum, which led to a green card and then American citizenship.

In May, Republican senators gave in to pressure from Trump to tank a bipartisan border security bill. During Trump’s presidency, he drastically cut legal immigration by withholding green cards and turning away refugees.

On the campaign trail, Trump has continued to put immigration front and center.

“We are going to start the largest mass deportation in the history of our country because we have no choice, it’s not sustainable,” he said at an August press conference at Mar-a-Lago.

However, Talvera said it is Democratic presidents who have failed to deliver on the reforms they promised that would make it easier for other asylum seekers to gain legal status in the United States like he did.

“President (Barack) Obama is the one who deported more people,” he said. “Nobody reports that. President Trump is the one that deported less people, and nobody reports that.”

Former President Barack Obama did deport more people per year and in total than Trump, according to analysis from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Immigrants in Maryland who follow the law have nothing to fear from Trump’s threats of mass deportations, Talavera said. Other Latinos he speaks to are more concerned about inflation and the economy than immigration.

In a recent Pew Research poll, Latinos who support Trump listed the economy, violent crime and immigration as their top three issues, while Latinos who support Harris listed the economy, health care and gun policy.

Both Democrats and Republicans try to use the immigration debate to their advantage, said Melvin, a mechanic in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Originally from Guatemala, Melvin is one of the state’s roughly 260,000 undocumented immigrants and is therefore unable to vote. But political rhetoric and policies still affect Melvin and his family. CNS is not using Melvin’s last name at his request because of his legal status.

Though Melvin is from a Spanish-speaking Latin American country, he does not consider himself Latino. He is Maya Mam, an Indigenous Maya people in western Guatemala and southwestern Mexico.

Melvin said he left his home country due to racial prejudice and lack of opportunities. He said as an Indigenous person, he’s never been able to depend on the government to have his interests at heart.

Melvin said election season doesn’t feel much different from any other time of year – he always feels anxiety about deportation.

“Let's put it like this, you're living in a jungle, right? So you have to be ready if you're gonna be the prey,” Melvin said. “So it's just like a cat and the mouse. So you're the mouse. That's the life we're living. This is my life. Since I born.”

Melvin said that anti-immigrant rhetoric adds to his stress.

“It affects us because people hate us more and more,” he said. “So when you see news, you are afraid to go out or somewhere, and then people can attack you just because you look a Latino.”

Melvin said he agreed with some of Trump’s policies during his presidency. “But, you know,” he said, “I'm not going to support what Trump's going to say about the people, even about Black people, or other people, Chinese people, or whoever's. I'm not agree with that.”

Nilsa Yurivilca-Zuasnabar, originally from Peru, and now an advocate for asylum-seekers in Baltimore, said Trump’s record, including his family separation policy at the border and racist remarks against immigrants, makes the choice in this election clear.

“So I noticed, even myself, I even as a naturalized citizen, what Trump did in his last term, is creating a whole department of denaturalization,” she said. “So even immigrants who naturalize, they also are afraid or scared, or I know that I am.”

Though Trump did not make a denaturalization department, he did create a section within the Department of Justice dedicated to denaturalization, or stripping a naturalized immigrant of citizenship.

Yurivilca-Zuasnabar said both political parties politicize immigration and support border militarization.

She said she’ll vote for Harris “but I am not voting with joy.”

Still, Yurivilca-Zuasnabar said voting is a privilege that she takes seriously and she votes on behalf of everyone in her community who can’t vote.

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