Sara Nelson, who manages programming for the St. Paul-based Center for Victims of Torture, sees each day how a climate of hostility toward immigrants negatively impacts not only their emotional well-being, but their physical health.
In her work, she aims to support their healing. Opened in 1985 with the mission of serving refugees and asylum seekers impacted by torture and conflict-related trauma, CVT provides free services empowering survivors to rebuild their lives, like assistance navigating the health care system, support groups, and therapists trained in trauma-sensitive practices.
On October 11, Nelson will be speaking at the Minnesota Doctors for Health Equity’s annual meeting, focused this year on advancing health equity for immigrants through advocacy. The event is open to all, though members are typically health care providers.
Related: For immigrants in Brooklyn Park, political violence brought added dimensions to fear and confusion
In advance of the event, MinnPost spoke with Nelson about how the Center continues to serve the needs of clients amid expanding challenges to their wellness, including the “One Big Beautiful Bill” denying many of them Medicare and Medicaid coverage.
“Immigrants are still here,” Nelson said. “They still have rights.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
MinnPost: How has the Center for Victims of Torture’s work been impacted by federal funding cuts and uncertainty?
Nelson: In January, CVT lost 75% of our funding. Most of that was focused on our international programming in Ethiopia, in Kenya, in Jordan.
The landscape for the programs located in Minnesota has been a little bit better. People are concerned about the stability of the funding, and concerned about the unknowns, but it’s been better on the Minnesota side than it has for international programming. We’ve been really lucky in Minnesota to receive support from state grants and we have a large community of financial donors that really stepped up when they saw that we were losing so much federal funding.
That doesn’t mean operations in Minnesota won’t be affected in the future. There could be more cuts, but we still see the same number of clients now that we did in the beginning of January.
MinnPost: Has outside rhetoric and uncertainty made it more difficult to continue work at the Center in Minnesota?
Nelson: Our clients are hearing the rhetoric out there in the world and in the community – how we talk about immigrants, how they’re talked about by the federal government, how they’re talked about by our leaders in government. That impacts them. They came to the United States because they wanted to live in a free country, support democracy, get jobs, give back to the communities here and be part of our community.
They’re coming to us now feeling much less hope and feeling more despair. They’re asking, “Is my asylum case going to ever get to court? Or is it going to be approved?”
There’ve been a lot of changes to the asylum process, some of which are difficult for us to understand and explain to clients. We have had an increase in clients who’ve been asked to wear ankle monitors as part of their ICE monitoring. That used to be very rare, now it’s becoming almost routine.
Feeling like they’re being constantly surveilled by our government reminds them of how they were treated back home. That’s why they left. There’s no reason to give folks with no criminal record, who are not a flight risk, who have jobs and active asylum cases, who have come to every [immigration] check-in, an ankle monitor. Except to humiliate them.
MinnPost: Can you tell us a bit about how the center supports the mental and physical health of clients?
Nelson: We do a wide variety of things at CVT, but the key factor in all of them is helping people restore a sense of belonging and a positive sense of self.
For some clients, that might look like individual psychotherapy. For other clients, we have volunteer physical therapists who work on mind-body connection, helping to restore a sense of competency. Clients also might work with social workers to get resources and better understand how they can plug into their community.
We also have support groups that are more peer focused. We just wrapped up a group led by one of our community health workers for women who just had a child or who were pregnant. These moms from countries all around the world came together once a week and held each others’ babies and learned about infant development and the importance of attachment. But the really important part of that group was that they were building community with one another.
MinnPost: How have your clients’ needs changed in the past year, particularly around health care and well-being?
Nelson: Clients are coming to us with more acute symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. We’ve had multiple clients whose symptoms had improved and who were done with treatment who’ve asked to be reopened to services because their symptoms have come back. Some of the symptoms returning are due to these ankle monitors, some of them due to just the general rhetoric, the uncertainty, the stress of it all.
We’re also seeing clients delay physical medical care because they’re afraid to go to the doctor’s offices. I haven’t seen a lot of ICE enforcement at medical clinics, but there’s a lot of rumors of ICE enforcement at medical clinics, which is almost the same thing when it comes to whether or not someone’s going to go to the doctor. So a lot of our clients are afraid to access medical care or they try to put off appointments. They’re afraid to go to the emergency room if they’re having an emergency and things just become more acute because they’re not getting that preventative care.
Related: DHS shuts ‘open door’ for women and queer immigrants to report abuse, advocates say
MinnPost: With clients from so many different parts of the world, how do cultural considerations play a part in your work?
Nelson: One of the biggest things that we do is try to hire staff from within the cultures that we serve, so that when clients walk in, they can talk to someone in a language that they’re familiar with, who understands their religion and their culture.
MinnPost: What can people learn at the Minnesota Doctors for Health Equity conversation on Oct. 11?
Nelson: I’ll be talking about a couple of things. One will be helping very new immigrants access healthcare. Nobody’s coming in through the refugee process right now, but when folks come in, especially asylum seekers, they’re not given any formal support from the U.S. government. So it’s really up to them to figure out the U.S. health care system. I’ll also be talking about integrating mental health and physical health for refugee and asylum-seeking populations. Almost all of our clients complain of chronic pain. Sometimes it’s physical pain from their torture, but often there’s also a psychological component. They might come in and instead of complaining of anxiety they might say that they have a headache or their stomach hurts. That doesn’t make the symptoms any less real or worthy of attention. It just means they need a different kind of attention.
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