UC San Diego

For the professionals who work or volunteer with detained migrants, providing care or advocacy requires navigating morally tumultuous double binds and exposure to an environment of harm. Working in immigration detention spaces has a cost, both for the professional’s mental health and for the detainees who rely on professionals’ capacity to intervene in a system of harm and neglect. Using a moral injury framework, this paper explores the landscape of professionals’ moral injury experiences, from sources of injury to strategies of management. Ethnographic interviews with detention employees, case workers, forensic psychologists, and medical evaluators revealed a range of strategies and outcomes of moral injury. While professionals used strategies like moral numbing or avoidance to protect themselves and continue providing care, the withholding or lessening of care has consequences for the detainees relying on their intervention. Yet not utilizing strategies has its own cost, as professionals experience burnout, trauma, and hauntings. In attempting to intervene or lessen harm, care becomes a justification for and a source of violence in professionals' lives. Understanding how policies and structural forces come to create the circumstances of moral injury is critical not only for understanding individual experiences of harm, but to identify ways to disrupt systemic sources of violence. Examining the moral dimensions to professionals' experiences and distress allows for more informed, targeted interventions to disrupt this harm and empower professionals’ efforts to provide care and advocacy within detention spaces.