Today in Trump’s America
By 
This morning at about 4, I had a dream. I was taken up by fascist thugs into an airplane and thrown out of it like the Argentine dictatorship did to those they wanted to disappear. Just before my body hit the ground, I woke up with a fright. That was the first Trump dream that I remember. It’s going to quite a good time in the next 4 years. Or the rest of my life.
Of course, I am not the only person feeling this way. Because there’s a lot of people with fears much more visceral and immediate than mine.
Since the 8 November election, pediatricians and clinics serving undocumented immigrants and other low-income patients have reported a spike in anxiety and panic attacks, particularly among children who worry that they or their parents might now face deportation.
One little boy in North Carolina has been suffering crippling stomach aches in class because he’s afraid he might return home to find his parents gone. In California, many families are reporting that their children are leaving school in tears because their classmates have told them they are going to be thrown out of the country.
Children are showing up in emergency rooms alone because their parents are afraid of being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they show their faces. Even American-born children are suffering – one boy in the south-east asked a doctor for Prozac because he was worried about his undocumented friend.
“It’s as though a volcano erupted. It’s been awful,” said Mimi Lind, director of behavioral health at the Venice Family Clinic, one of the largest providers of healthcare to low-income families in southern California. “People who don’t have a history of anxiety and depression are coming forward with symptoms they’ve never had before. And people who had those symptoms already are getting much worse.”
It’s too soon to put precise figures on the wave of Trump-related anxiety, but health professionals and immigrant rights groups say it is unmistakable. “People worry their families will be broken up, that parents will be deported and children will end up in foster care, on a scale that we’ve never seen before. The feeling out there is one of great fear,” said Marielena Hincapié of the National Immigration Law Center.
I just can’t even deal right now.