07-05-2025
No One Talks About This Part of Being Undocumented
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The Manila version of my Dad—the one I knew for the first seven years of my life—was a warm and joyous presence. He was my favorite person. Thrilled that I had learned to read at the age of three, he took me to the city's National Bookstore every weekend for new books. We cuddled as he played his guitar or his keyboard, me singing along as he practiced. He showed me how to use his architect desk's T-square, then built floor plans with me using my Legos. He took me to school, perched on his shoulders while we waited for our usual jeepney. He encouraged my curiosity and taught me to be brave. Once, after I was suspended from Catholic school for kicking a boy (he stole my friend's lunch), Dad rewarded me with a trip to the park and a cheese-and-ube ice cream cone from one of Manila's street ice cream carts. 'Never let the bullies win,' he said.
Something in America turned Dad into my worst bully, my most feared abuser. In March 1990, when I was seven and my little sister was one, Dad left the post-Marcos regime Philippines to work overseas as a cruise ship musician. By the time we saw him again, reunited in New York in August 1992, Dad was a changed man. Where his eyes were once bright and crinkled with a smile, they had become blank, weighed at the brow with sadness. His mouth, once so ready with a joke or a song, turned down at the corners. Dad: the American version.
Courtesy Jill Damatac
In those years of being undocumented in the United States, my sister and I learned to fear. Our parents taught us to keep to ourselves, to never speak to the police or call 911. At home, there was no respite from fear. Dad had become dark and capricious, often violent, sulking, or angry, hurting me, my younger sister, and our mother regularly.
My father's fears began to manifest as compulsive hoarding. At first, the boxes piled up in the garage, and then the den, making their way up into the hallways. Slowly, my parents' house–a modest bi-level in suburban New Jersey–became a labyrinth of hoarded boxes, filling the living room, dining room, guest bedroom, and, eventually, the deck and the backyard. In this labyrinth of depression, rage, and paranoia, I lost my father. I didn't know it then, in my family's decades of hiding and being undocumented, but I would never find my father again.
We adjusted to his moods, became quiet, compliant, and apologetic. As the eldest daughter, I became his emotional caretaker, listening to his angry rants and bitter tirades. Mom, my sister, and I put his feelings and needs above our own–to do so was to survive another day. I hid my bruises, made up excuses at school for a cracked tooth or the welts on the backs of my thighs.
By the time I was in high school, Dad had withdrawn from the world completely. He had stopped working, afraid of being deported. He barricaded himself amidst his hoarded boxes, leaving home only for Sunday Mass and the grocery store. He isolated himself, rarely seeing family. He did not have a single friend. His depression was the air we breathed.
Eventually, the depression overtook me, too–partly inherited, partly triggered by our circumstances. By the time I escaped my parents' house at 24, I had attempted suicide three times. In New York City, struggling alone and mostly without health insurance, I ignored my mental health, focused only on finding work, paying my bills, and surviving. Diagnosed, once, by a family doctor friend, I buried my depression, anxiety, and insomnia under denial. Besides, I had no way of obtaining or being able to afford treatment.
Psychological studies reveal the dire mental health consequences experienced by families like mine. According to the American Psychiatric Association , undocumented immigrants face multiple mental health risk factors. My family experienced many of them: trauma in our homeland, before migration (my parents grew up in dictatorship), and then, once in America, racism and discrimination in social settings, at school, and at work.
We moved frequently to avoid detection, grappling with the fear, paranoia, and instability that followed. We were socially isolated, as Filipino immigrants living in less racially diverse parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a tradeoff for being somewhat safer from immigration raids. Our lowered socioeconomic status was a psychological stressor; our lack of trust in the US government led us to also distrust legal systems and advocacy groups, as well as institutions, including the healthcare system.
Dad never got help for his mental and general health struggles: he died undocumented in 2022 of a heart attack at the age of 67, afraid to go to the doctor without health insurance (and also out of misplaced toxic masculine pride). His depression, anxiety, and insomnia—undiagnosed, but their symptoms undeniable—were never treated.
Dad and I were estranged when he died. I was in England, an ocean away from New Jersey. I had made the painful decision to self-deport in 2015. After twenty-two years, I was no longer able to continue with the undocumented struggle. In London, where my British husband and I had settled after our years in New York, I slowly allowed myself to acknowledge what had happened to me, to my family.
Studies show that the children of immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, suffer higher rates of psychological distress than their parents. In facing my demons, I reckoned with the years of struggle and abuse that I faced while undocumented; this reckoning was a near-traumatic experience of its own. With help from NHS England, I gained access to talk therapy and medication. Through a combination of state-funded healthcare and affordable private therapy, I untangled, over the course of my decade in the UK, the roots and consequences of being undocumented, of surviving domestic and sexual violence, and the toll everything took on my spirit.
Medical and therapeutic care is only one part of the equation in my ongoing journey of self-recovery and healing. In my decade in England as a legal immigrant, then a permanent resident, and, finally, as a British citizen as of November 2023, I also found deeper modes of healing: self-fulfillment and achievement, a sense of belonging and stability, and a feeling of trust in the freedoms that come with papers. In being able to do the things I couldn't do while undocumented in the US, my depression abated, my anxiety lessened. They are lifelong companions, never banished. But right now, they no longer consume me.
Courtesy Jill Damatac
My husband and I returned to the US in February 2025, brought back by a transfer within his firm. Just as I have changed over the past decade, so has the United States. My family is no longer here–my mom and sister have left the country–but I feel a deep kinship with this country's immigrants (undocumented or otherwise) and refugees. In witnessing the ways immigrants, particularly of color, are now being treated, I find myself regressing, some days, my mind and body reconnecting to old traumas and fears.
My family and I had lived through so much fear while hiding and undocumented in the 1990s, made worse by 2003, when ICE was established. Even with the fear I feel now, as a legal immigrant with the right to work in the US, I cannot imagine the terror that undocumented immigrants now feel in this time of increasingly aggressive removal actions. The wrongful arrest, detention, and deportation of legal or non-criminal immigrants, such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, are on the rise–it is becoming impossible to feel safe. Many are afraid to go to work, to go grocery shopping, to go to church or the hospital, to let their children attend school. Immigrant and undocumented children now reportedly experience greater levels of bullying, taunted with threats of deportation because of the color of their skin. In February, Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, 11, and Gabriela Aparicio Ortega, 13, allegedly committed suicide due to anti-immigration-related bullying.
Since returning to the US, I feel an ambivalent gratitude for my relative safety, though this is now starting to feel under threat. Some days, I even try to find joy. But my years of undocumented fear and suffering from the age of nine to thirty-two have left an indelible sadness in me, one that resonates with the struggles of immigrants now being targeted.
Each day, I wake up and do my best to remember that I have had the privilege of experiencing fulfillment, healing, and self-recovery in Britain, my adopted country, that I am lucky to be able to help where I can, to have a safer country to which I can return, if needed. Some days, pulling myself back from the brink of depression is easier; some days, particularly when the news around immigration is very bad, I can barely try. The difference is that this time, I now know to remind myself that the journey of healing is lifelong. That I am equipped with the tools to take care of myself on those difficult days so that I can do my work as a writer, as a witness. Tools that I wish I could have given my father when he was still alive.
Jill Damatac is the author of Dirty Kitchen , a food memoir of her two decades as an undocumented Filipino immigrant in the United States (out May 6, Atria/One Signal). A writer and filmmaker, her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Nation, the BBC, and TIME. Her documentary film on indigenous Filipino tattooist Apo Whang Od was an official DOC NYC selection and the winner of Best Documentary at Ireland's Kerry Film Festival. Find Jill on Instagram .
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