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I’m describing the pleasant versions of each of these archetypes. The ones who mostly do no harm. They are evil variants of each. The Complicator: complicates all the time, will never stop. Drama Aggregator: aggregates drama for sport. Love chaos. The Avoider: literally does not want to work.
Future article here, yes.

	Social	Quiet
Work	Sales, management, Roy Lee-style social-media-driven AI companies.	Programming, art, photography, other craft-based professions.
Personal	Hanging out with your friends on the weekend. Biking up a mountain. Touching grass.	Painting watercolors while listening to jazz. Reading a good book.

For generations, Black Americans have prepared their children for the realities of racism. As ICE expands its reach, more parents are navigating similar conversations.

Ana is a Mexican-American woman who, as a child, did not live in fear of immigration raids. She’s a U.S.-born citizen who grew up in Mexicantown, Detroit, a Southwest neighborhood that serves as a cultural hub for the city’s Latinx population.

Her grandparents immigrated to the United States with legal status from a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Admittedly, Ana, 38, did not have much awareness about the experiences of undocumented immigrants until she started dating her now-husband in 2012. At 18, he entered the country without documentation, arriving from the same area of Mexico as Ana’s family.

“We started dating in the early fall, and I remember that he couldn’t take me out, and I was so distraught. Like, ‘Do you not want to take me out?’ But he couldn’t get a job because he didn’t have a Social Security number,” said Ana, whose name has been changed by The 19th to protect her family.

When she imagined getting married and raising a family, her list of motherhood expectations definitely did not include one day preparing her elementary school-age children, all of them U.S. citizens, for an encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): Memorize our home address. Take daddy’s phone and hit record. Call mom.

This is Ana’s reality during the second Trump administration. Her husband still does not have legal status. Together, they have three children who are 9, 7 and 5 years old, and the family speaks openly at home about the risks they face.

“I’m parenting in a political climate that could separate my whole family. It could break us apart,” Ana said. “It’s just one more thing; this emotional labor that we carry on as mothers — but this one’s with more stress.”

Man and women concerned — Ana says parenting during the second Trump administration carries a new level of stress. “I’m parenting in a political climate that could separate my whole family,” she said. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)

Across the country, immigrant mothers and mothers who are partnered with immigrants are forced to teach their children a lesson of survival as President Donald Trump continues his historic expansion of immigration enforcement. Over the past year, $75 billion — an unprecedented increase — has been approved for building new detention centers, hiring thousands of immigration officers and surging ICE operations.

The administration initially claimed it would focus on detaining and deporting people with criminal convictions, but independent analyses of ICE data show that about one-third of those arrested in 2025 had a criminal conviction. The rest included people without convictions — child care workers, high school honor roll students, parents heading to work and kids on their way home from school. Some are undocumented. Others have legal status or, in some cases, are U.S. citizens.

For generations of Black American mothers, preparing their children for interactions with police, including arrests or violence, is an unwelcome rite of passage known as “The Talk.” Historically, it has served as an act of love, vigilance and desperation by mothers seeking to protect their kids in a world that often views them as suspects first and children second.

In the Trump era, a different version of “The Talk” is emerging among immigrant parents who are living with the dread that their children could become targets as well.

As an Afro-Dominican woman living in North Carolina, Dania Santana is balancing multiple dynamics. Her youngest son, who is 11 years old, looks more like the stereotypical image people associate with Latinx children. Her middle son, who is 14, is a Black boy with afro-textured hair. Her 16-year-old daughter has a skin tone that is more of a mix between the two.

“I always get different reactions among different groups of people with my kids, of who is acceptable or cute and who is the opposite. It’s interesting because it’s different reactions from Black people, from Latino people and then from White people,” Santana said. “So I have different conversations with my children about how things can play out for them in this moment.”

Coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic at 25, Santana, now 48, had limited knowledge of U.S. racial dynamics until she began to witness the bias and discrimination firsthand. That understanding shaped the way she began to guide her children. When her older son, who has darker skin, was in middle school, Santana recalls hearing from his teacher that he and his friends were pulling small pranks in class.

Santana said that she took the incident as an opportunity to not only discourage her son from being disruptive in class, but also to share with him that he may not always receive the same level of grace as his White friends. “You need to learn this now before you’re out there,” she said.

With both ICE and local police on Santana’s mind, she feels on high alert all the time, questioning every aspect of where her children will be and who they will be with. This includes monitoring cell phone locations and sitting inside the nearby Starbucks while her kids hang at the mall. She has even considered moving her family to New York City, where she lived before North Carolina. At least in New York, her kids wouldn’t have to drive, she said. Or maybe they might flee the United States entirely if circumstances get worse.

“I have been very clear with them that the moment I see that things are turning, we will be looking into leaving the country,” she said. “So when my youngest son heard that the National Guard was coming, he thought it was that moment. He got really sad. He was like, ‘So we’re gonna have to leave everything behind?’”

Immigrant family — Ana has taught her children specific instructions in case of an encounter with ICE: memorize their address, record on their father’s phone and call their mother. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)

For many households in the United States, “The Talk” is a common method of racial socialization, a way for parents and caregivers to teach children about race and identity to both foster a sense of pride and to prepare them for societal inequities and police brutality.

Often, what prompts a parent to begin these conversations is a specific incident: a racist comment muttered under someone’s breath at the grocery store, a White mother on the playground instructing her child not to play with a Black child, said Dr. Leslie A. Anderson, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences at Morgan State University.

As part of her research, Anderson analyzed how Black families with young school-age children navigated “The Talk.” She and her team found that many parents gave their children specific directives on how to act when in the presence of law enforcement. This includes keeping their hands visible at all times, remaining calm and respectful to the officers, answering officers’ questions and directing the officers to their parents. In other cases, parents instruct their children to leave the situation and find them or another trusted adult, which could unintentionally escalate the interaction.

Research indicates that when done thoughtfully, with specific, practical directives, “The Talk” can be beneficial for children, Anderson said. “But it’s also extremely stressful for the parent, primarily the mom, to have to navigate these conversations in the first place,” she said. “And what I found is that a lot of folks feel inept, like, ‘I know I need to have this conversation. I don’t know how to do it.’”

Black and Brown people regardless of citizenship or immigration status face disproportionate risk of racial profiling and violence by law enforcement. Recent studies have also captured how the day-to-day lives of immigrants can be heavily shaped by the threat of immigration enforcement. One survey conducted among a representative sample of Latinx and Asian immigrants in California between 2018 and 2020 found that about 43 percent of Latinx immigrants and 13 percent of Asian immigrants knew someone who had been deported, said Dr. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, an immigrant health scholar and professor at the University of California, Merced.

About 16 percent of Latinx immigrants and 10 percent of Asian immigrants reported experiencing racial profiling. When it comes to speaking with children about ICE, conversations may start when children ask their parents specific questions based on what they’re observing. But many times, the conversations are not explicit, Young said.

Families walking in Detroit's Mexicantown — Families walk past restaurants and shops in Mexicantown, a Southwest neighborhood that serves as a cultural hub for Detroit’s Latinx population. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)

Immigrant parents experience varying levels of comfort speaking directly about their status. They may instruct kids to avoid staring out from windows or going outdoors on certain occasions, which can be confusing, at least initially. Over time, the children may begin to pick up on their parents’ fears and any ICE presence in their communities — and they will connect the dots for themselves.

Many immigrant mothers feel that the country’s approach to immigration has intensified over the course of their lives. Some did not have to confront conversations about immigration enforcement until having to do so with their own children during the Trump administration.

Maya was born in India, spent her childhood in Australia and moved to the Seattle area when she was 12. The schools she attended in the United States were not diverse, so she often felt different from other kids. Immigration-specific conversations were never really on her radar until after she received a green card in high school and later began to face more explicit experiences with xenophobia as an adult, she said.

Her son was just 1 year old when Trump returned to Washington for a second time. The 35-year-old and her husband live in a predominantly White New Jersey town. The week Trump got elected, she said, an older White man walked up to her and her son at the grocery store and told her to go back to her country.

In the 15 months since, Maya, whose name The 19th has changed, has watched online videos of ICE agents storming playgrounds and posting up outside of elementary schools. She’s read the stories of what’s happened in Minnesota, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents, as well as the detention of 5-year-old Liam Ramos.

Maya has her green card and should be legally shielded from an ICE arrest or detention. Yet she has seen news reports documenting the apprehension of people with legal work permits, green cards or pending asylum cases.

Maya’s green card expires next year.

Mother with child in park — Maya, who has a green card, is teaching her 3-year-old son what to do if he is ever separated from her during an immigration enforcement encounter, including to say, “I want my mommy” and “I want my daddy.” (Courtesy of Maya)

Her son is 3 years old now, and there’s only so much he can absorb, Maya said. She struggles with the balance between protecting his innocence and childhood and making sure he’s prepared should anything happen. His nanny is undocumented, which adds an extra layer of complication because ICE could come after her while she’s out with Maya’s son. Maya said there are days when her phone will ping with a text from the nanny saying she can’t make it to work because ICE agents are near her home.

For now, Maya tells her young son:

Do not go anywhere except with his nanny, mom and dad.

Do not walk away with any strangers.

If his nanny gets pulled over while he’s in the car, he needs to immediately say, “I want my mommy.” “I want my daddy.”

Maya also keeps a laminated card tucked into the backseat pocket of her car. It states, “If left unattended, please contact,” with her name and phone number, as well as her husband’s name and phone number.

Maya said she feels isolated in her town, which has few other women of color. She described encounters with other mothers in her area who appear confused by the fear she is experiencing. She also hasn’t been able to find any resources to help her navigate having age-appropriate conversations with her son about ICE and the political climate, which heightens the anxiety.

“I think that is the piece of motherhood that is changing so much, because when you are living a very different version of motherhood versus someone who is White, who has lived here for generations, who does not have this level of stress and anxiety on them at all times. It’s a very different experience,” she said.

In conversations with The 19th, immigrant mothers’ concerns in some ways mirrored those of the Black parents from Anderson’s research. Immigrant moms largely expressed feeling ill-equipped to handle conversations about ICE with their kids. They also struggled with the grief that their children will have to internalize adult problems at an early age.

Husband and wife by staircase — As immigration enforcement operations intensify nationwide, families like Ana’s are building contingency plans for moments they hope never come. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)

Some studies suggest that Black children who received “The Talk” report lower levels of stress related to the anticipation of police brutality. But general exposure to incidents with law enforcement has been shown to create psychological distress in Black and Brown children. For immigrants or children of immigrants, the more times a person comes into contact with immigration enforcement, the higher their risk for psychological distress and self-reported poor health outcomes over the course of their lives, Young said.

Black and Brown mothers are trying to balance all of these factors.

“No one should have to tell their children, first of all, that the streets might not be safe anymore. Like, as mothers, we don’t want to tell our children that they shouldn’t trust the police, that the police might get into their schools and try to detain kids like them,” said Linda López Stone, who came to the United States from Ecuador nearly two decades ago and has three children ages 12, 14 and 17.

She lives in Utah, and has made a point to teach her kids their basic rights and, most importantly, to know when to stay quiet. “No digas nada,” she has told them. Don’t say anything to law enforcement about themselves, their immigration status, their parents or their friends. If there’s any silver lining, Stone said, it’s that she’s raising children who are engaged and active in their communities, serving as a language bridge for their classmates who cannot speak English and passing on the safety lessons they have learned to other kids.

“I have let them know everyone is an immigrant, and everyone that you know who is a person of color is under threat, even myself,” Stone said. “So you have to make sure that the people around you, your friends and your peers, are aware of what’s happening, and it’s important to take care of each other.”

The article was originally published by The 19th on February 24, 2026. Click here to read the original article.

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The post How Do You Explain ICE to Your Child? Immigrant Families Are Having ‘The Talk’ appeared first on DCReport.org.

Early this morning, the U.S. and Israel launched a major military assault on Iran. Early reports suggested that Israel targeted senior officials in Iran’s government while the U.S. attacked military targets. The U.S. government named the assault “Operation Epic Fury.” Iran state media reported the strikes killed at least 200 people, including 118 students from a girls’ school, and wounded more than 700.

Iran retaliated with strikes against Israel, where one person was killed and 121 others injured, and with strikes on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. U.S. Central Command said there are no U.S. casualties and there has been little damage to U.S. facilities.

Shortly after the strikes, President Donald J. Trump, who was in Florida at Mar-a-Lago, posted an 8-minute video on social media announcing “major combat operations in Iran.” He warned: “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission.”

Trump referred to that mission vaguely, rehearsing a litany of complaints over the tensions and sometimes combat between the U.S. and Iran since 1979, but indicated the U.S. and Israel were attacking to prevent the country’s murderous regime from becoming “a nuclear-armed Iran.”

In June 2025, the Trump administration struck Iran’s nuclear laboratories at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, after which Trump insisted the U.S. had “completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities. In his message, Trump said the U.S. in negotiations afterward warned Iran “never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades.”

Trump did not mention the landmark 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama, that limited Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Trump withdrew the U.S. from that accord in 2018, and within a year, Iran was ignoring the limits the JCPOA imposed.

But, hours after his team posted his video, Trump told Natalie Allison and Tara Copp of the Washington Post that his real goal is regime change for Iran. “All I want is freedom for the people,” he told the reporters in a phone call shortly after 4 A.M. Eastern Time. In his video address, Trump told Iran’s armed forces and police they “must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death.” He told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson, Karen DeYoung, Natalie Allison, and Souad Mekhennet reported this evening in the Washington Post that U.S. intelligence officers assessed that a threat from Iran was not “imminent,” saying it was unlikely that Iran would pose a threat to the U.S. mainland for at least ten years. The International Atomic Energy Agency says there is no evidence Iran has an active plan for creating nuclear weapons, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that if Iran tries to build an intercontinental ballistic missile, it will take them at least a decade.

This afternoon, Trump posted on social media that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a cleric who has ruled Iran as supreme leader since 1989, was killed in the strikes, a fact later confirmed by Iran. After celebrating Khamenei’s death, Trump posted: “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.” He claimed without offering evidence that many of Iran’s soldiers and police “no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us,” and expressed hope that those forces “will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves.”

Notably, he did not suggest how one would get “immunity,” or from whom, or what the process of taking back the country would look like just months after the regime killed tens of thousands of protesters. He also appears unconcerned that the coordinated response to the attack from Iran’s leadership even after the death of Khamenei suggests regime change will not be a question of knocking out the leader.

In his triumphant post, Trump concluded with an Orwellian “war is peace” statement, writing that the process of rebuilding should start soon because in just a day the bombing had “very much destroyed and, even, obliterated” so much of the country. “The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”

Trump’s objectives for going to war sound vague because they are. The event that triggered his attack is also vague—so far, there is no evidence of an imminent threat that required the attack. His prescription for what his war is trying to accomplish is also vague.

It’s a given that this sort of vaguely justified attack on another country usually reflects that the leaders in the attacking country are worried about losing power and are launching a war to try to get disaffected people to rally around the flag.

Indeed, social media users are already referring to the attack as “Operation Epstein Fury,” suggesting it is an attempt to distract from the frequent appearance of the president’s name in the Epstein files as well as the recent story that the Department of Justice illegally withheld an allegation that Trump raped a thirteen-year-old.

Before his State of the Union address, Trump’s approval rating had fallen to an abysmal 37%, while 59% of Americans disapproved. His speech did little to convince Americans that he is trying to address their concerns about the economy: G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that after the speech, only 30% of Americans think Trump is focused on the things that matter to them, while 57% think he is focused on other things.

The January inflation report, out yesterday, showed prices rising faster than expected, inspiring Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to suggest Americans should buy cheaper food. “Most of the cheap cuts of meat are very inexpensive,” he said. “You can buy liver or the cheaper cuts of steak.”

Scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder noted in Thinking About… that Trump’s personal corruption is another interpretive framework for thinking about his decision to go to war. Trump’s sudden foray into regime change after years of attacking other presidents who tried it raises the question of whether he is acting for other countries in the Middle East he considers his allies.

“Given the stupefyingly overt corruption of the Trump administration,” Snyder wrote, “one must ask whether the United States armed forces are now being used on a per-hire basis.” Snyder noted that Gulf Arab states eager to curb Iran’s power “have generated extremely generous packages of compensation for companies associated with Trump personally and with members of his family.”

Last week, Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, both of whom have deep financial ties to the Middle East, would guide the decision of whether to strike Iran. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for U.S. strikes on Iran for a long time, and hours after Snyder wrote, Washington Post journalists Birnbaum, Hudson, DeYoung, Allison, and Mekhennet reported that Trump decided to attack Iran after Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman made “multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack” while at the same time publicly calling for a diplomatic solution.

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall pointed out that as his power diminishes, Trump “is leaning heavily into the presidential prerogative powers where his power is most untrammeled, where the loss of political power doesn’t really matter. Almost no presidential power is more clearly in that character [than] the president’s control over the military.”

And that is the crux of the matter. For all the vagueness of Trump’s justifications and goals in attacking Iran, he has launched a war—his word—on his own, assuming the powers of a dictator.

The Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to declare war. After fighting for their independence against a king they considered a tyrant, the men of the constitutional convention were not about to hand the power of raising an army to a single man. One delegate commented that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.”

Trump’s attack on Iran also violates the charter of the United Nations, under which members promise not to attack other states. This particular attack raises the specter of a larger war. In an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council today, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “[e]verything must be done to prevent a further escalation” in the Middle East.

Trump launched his attack while lawmakers were not scheduled to be in Washington, D.C., for a week, but Democrats are demanding Congress return immediately to vote on whether to continue military action against Iran. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) said in an interview: “This is one of the most dangerous efforts that Trump is undertaking in the second term: trying to normalize war without Congress, trying to normalize the idea that a president can just do whatever they want when it comes to foreign policy.” Huge though this is, there is a larger issue behind it: Since taking office again, Trump has gone out of his way to define tariffs, deportations, and so on as part of national security policy.

The president is supposed to get Congress’s buy-in to go to war in part because that requirement forces an executive to convince the American people that a contemplated military action is worth their tax dollars and their lives. But Trump made little effort to explain his Iran attack to the American people, and they oppose it. Morris notes that support for attacking Iran has held fairly steady for months and remained so after the strikes, with 34% in favor of them and 44% opposed. This is “incredibly low” support for a foreign war, Morris writes, and support for military action tends to be highest at the start of a war.

Trump’s attack on Iran scorns the will of the people and their constitutional right to decide whether they want to pay for a war with their money and their lives. That disdain for democratic government reveals that Trump’s military adventure against Iran is also fundamentally an attack on the United States of America.

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Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/28/middleeast/israel-attack-iran-intl-hnk

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-trumps-full-statement-on-iran-attack

https://abcnews.com/US/months-after-operation-midnight-hammer-us-strikes-iran/story?id=130599531

https://www.cfr.org/articles/trumps-iran-attack-was-impressive-airpower-has-its-limits

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-iran-nuclear-deal

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/28/trump-iran-war-regime-change-freedom/