Invisible Casualties: The Mental-Health Cost of Trump’s Deportation Blitz

By Nick Valencia | November 11, 2025

This story discusses mental health and suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You are not alone.

LOS ANGELES— In the final weeks of her life, a 55-year-old Latina woman from Northeast Los Angeles became convinced that immigration agents were watching her. She told those close to her that she feared being taken — not by strangers, but by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

She was an American citizen.

A source close to the woman—with intimate knowledge of her visits to a local health clinic— told Nick Valencia News she had long struggled with mental health challenges. By August, as federal immigration raids once again swept across the Los Angeles under the revived Trump deportation policy, the woman started to become obsessive about their presence on the streets. In the weeks leading up to her death, family members expressed a marked change in her already poor mental health.

A staff member at the local clinic where she’d been receiving care said the woman had expressed growing fear that, in her words, “ICE was coming for her.”

On the morning of August 25, the woman climbed the Avenue 60 overpass above the Arroyo Seco Parkway—the 110 Freeway that cuts through Highland Park. At 10:20 a.m., firefighters were called to reports of a woman dangling from the bridge. Moments later, she jumped, striking a passing vehicle before being pronounced dead at the scene. The driver survived physically unharmed.

While there is no direct evidence linking her suicide to immigration enforcement, the fears she voiced in her final days echo what many Latino families — including U.S. citizens — describe as an “ambient terror” that has returned to Southern California neighborhoods. It is a stark reminder that the collateral damage of immigration enforcement cannot be measured only in arrests or deportations. It’s measured, too, in anxiety attacks, sleepless nights, and in this case a life lost to fear itself.

Her death on the 110 Freeway underscores the invisible mental-health toll of deportation anxiety spreading across Southern California’s Latino communities. Under Trump’s renewed policy, the distinction between target and bystander has blurred. Agents have been seen outside grocery stores, churches, and construction sites. Rumors of raids ricochet through community chat groups faster than facts can catch up.

For someone already battling mental illness, that atmosphere can turn dread into delusion and delusion into despair.

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If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You are not alone.