This World Book Day, KIND is reading Through Iceboxes and Kennels: How Immigration Detention Harms Children and Families. Through Iceboxes and Kennels is the latest book by Dr. Luis Zayas, one of KIND’s Keeping Kids Safe Campaign Leadership Council members.
The book, published in March 2023, discusses the increase in people coming from Central America to seek safety in the United States over the past two decades and documents the experiences of migration and detention as told by children and parents. He shows the negative effects of Trump’s Administration’s immigration policies, including family separation and detention, on children and their families. Drawing on his expertise as an immigrant child and adolescent mental health expert and his experience assisting immigrant children in detention beginning in 2014, Dr. Zayas describes shows how migration and U.S. immigration detention harms immigrant children’s development and mental health. The book won the 2023 book award from the Society for Social Work and Research.
In KIND’s recent interview with Dr. Zayas, he talked about how he wrote the book to inform people about the experiences of these children, whose stories can be lost in the national debate over immigration. Dr. Zayas’ earlier book, Forgotten Citizens: Deportation, Children, and the Making of American Exiles and Orphans, shows how immigration policy subverts children’s rights, harms their mental health, and leaves lasting psychological trauma.
As part of his work with KIND’s Keeping Kids Safe Leadership Council, Dr. Zayas published an op-ed last year in the Houston Chronicle about the effects of detention of immigration children. Learn more about the Keeping Kids Safe Campaign here.