Camilla Forte/Borderless Magazine/Catchlight Local/Report for AmericaAt the height of Operation Midway Blitz, Diana Martinez moved her community support groups online to continue providing essential care.
Esta historia contó con el apoyo de la campaña Brave of Us.
Esta historia forma parte de Seis Meses de la Operación Midway Blitz, una mirada de cómo las acciones de control migratorio del ICE han afectado a los inmigrantes de Chicago, y lo que están haciendo para protegerse mutuamente.
As a community health worker, Diana Martinez is no stranger to navigating difficult situations.
Through her work at Enlace Chicago — a Little Village-based organization that provides support to community members — she’s helped immigrant families access health care amid state funding cuts and educated residents about the COVID-19 vaccine during a global pandemic.
Martinez also runs women’s empowerment groups that aim to uplift the women in her community.
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The group started in 2017 with a peer-to-peer support group called Grupos de Empoderamiento para Mujeres con Apoyo y Superación (GEMAS) or Women’s Empowerment Groups for Support and Personal Growth. Because of GEMAS’ popularity, a second group launched in 2021, known as “Amor por Mi Mismo” or “Love for Self.” The group offers a place for GEMAS graduates to continue fostering the relationships they’ve built.
When caravans of ICE and CPD agents started sweeping her neighborhood of Little Village during Operation Midway Blitz, Martinez had to delay the start of her GEMAS group and move her “Love for Self” meetings online.
Borderless Magazine spoke to Martinez about what Operation Midway Blitz meant for her support groups and the impact of increased deportations and raids in her community.
As health promoters, our role is to find various supports for the women who attend our groups, regardless of what they may need. That’s why we decided to give the participants of “Love for Self” the option to meet virtually again. It was a matter of access, but more than that, a way to show empathy amid the raids that none of us had experienced. It’s been incredibly challenging for us health promoters, too.
It was difficult to feel like I couldn’t support people as I should. We’d often think: “What more can we do? What more should we do?” Even when we’ve always done as much as we can. We’re always there for the women we care for, but dealing with heightened deportation raids and threats to our community has been incredibly challenging.
I realized that many of the women in my support groups were being flooded with so much upsetting information during the height of the Blitz. That obviously took a toll on me emotionally, but I was also aware of the toll it was taking on the women in my group. We’ve always been, at our core, a group of women who support each other.
When we meet, we often do activities to promote self-care. Small things that allow the participants to slow down and take time for themselves. It can be hard to do that because we’re so caught up with daily stressors and anxieties. Above all, though, my job is to listen. Many of the women in my group just want to talk about difficult situations they’re facing, things they can’t discuss at home or in front of their kids. The time we have together is theirs. More than anything, it’s important to me that they feel heard.
I wanted the safe spaces that we’d created through our groups to be a respite, so I chose to do something a bit different and avoid sharing upsetting information about ICE activity with them during those meetings. My hope was that we could use the meetings and channels we’d created as a place to look at things a bit differently. A space where we could look at the situation and feel hope.
We have four active women’s empowerment groups as part of our programming through Enlace Chicago, but only one of my colleagues was able to keep meeting in-person during the height of Midway Blitz. Both my groups had to go virtual. We did not see each other in person from August to January.
If we had a scheduled meeting and there was an ICE sighting, all meetings would be canceled. Doing it that way caused uncertainty, fear and stress for facilitators and participants.
It was challenging for me to return to these sessions virtually, and not everyone preferred it. Adapting to the technology was harder for some of the older women in my groups, but for me, it was an act of solidarity.
Being out on the street did not feel the same for me as it did for some of the women in my group. I decided that, until we could all be together — feeling safe and comfortable — we would meet virtually.
In January, we picked up where we left off and met with everyone in person again. The number of participants has slowly recovered to what it was before Operation Midway Blitz started. It took some women in my groups longer to feel ready to go outside, and that can have mental health consequences for them. It’s been beautiful to see them back.
Some of our community now feel like they can breathe easier. I say some because this is still not the case for everyone. We’re all conscious that ICE agents are still in Chicago and raids are still happening. Obviously, we’d like not to believe that, but realistically, this is not over. Federal immigration agents can come back whenever they want.
This story was produced using Borderless Magazine’s collaborative as-told-to method. To learn how we make stories like these, check out our as-told-to visual explainer.
Camilla Forte es becaria de CatchLight y miembro del cuerpo Report for America que cubre las comunidades inmigrantes para Borderless Magazine. Se puede contactar con ella en [email protected].
