On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino guy who drove from their distributed apartment above a small auto repair shop that day experienced failed to return-arrested, one at a time, by ICE agents and local law enforcement. As the two women discussed what to do following, a SWAT group clad in body armor and holding assault rifles stormed the room. As Guadalupe remembers it, ‘The soldiers came in the house. They knocked down about Separated: Family members and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid doorways. They threw gas. That they had guns. We had been two ladies with small children . The youngsters terrified, the kids screaming.’

In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the long lasting damage performed by this daylong work of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw State, Michigan. Discovering the chaos of enforcement through the zoom lens of community wellness, Lopez discusses deportation’s rippling unwanted effects on families, communities, and individuals. Focusing on those left out, Lopez reveals their initiatives to handle trauma, prevent homelessness, handle worsening wellness, and keep their families together as they make an effort to deal with a deportation machine that is militarized, distressing, implicitly racist, and profoundly violent.