Between January 1st and 31st of 2026, approximately eight people were either shot by I.C.E. agents or died in I.C.E. detention. Renee Nicole Goode and Alex Pretti were killed in broad daylight. The others—Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez, died in custody. It is sickening how quickly tragedies like these are flattened into headlines, speculation, and political sound bites. But before their names are absorbed into background noise, it deserves to be spoken plainly: many lives have been ended senselessly and violently, and many more families are being pulled into irreversible grief.
For many Americans, especially those already living with fear, deaths like these are not abstractions or talking points. They live in the body. They sharpen existing dread. They confirm a growing sense that our safety is increasingly fragile.
In my work as a therapist, I see how national events like this don’t remain “out there.” They follow people into the room with me, shaping what they fear, what they plan for, and how much of the future they feel able to imagine.
As a therapist in the Chicagoland area, I’m used to helping people navigate heartbreak, loss, and conflict. But since Trump was re-elected, our sessions have taken a darker turn. My clients aren’t just anxious about relationships—some are abjectly terrified of them or their loved ones being detained, deported, or silenced.
Therapy has now become a place where Americans process not just personal trauma, but national collapse.
I felt guilty for missing the No Kings rally on October 18, 2025 as well as several subsequent marches. They are often scheduled on Saturdays, and Saturdays are workdays for me. Therapists tend to work many evenings and weekends so we can see people who can’t come during the 9:00 – 5:00 hours.
The clients who sat across from me that day weren’t at the rally either, for many reasons: autoimmune disease, mobility issues, caretaking responsibilities—and, most painfully, fear of being targeted.
When my last client broke down in tears, terrified that she or her family might be detained, I realized my role that day wasn’t in the streets. It was in that chair, supporting those who live with fear every single day—people who sense the shadow of authoritarianism not just as a talking point, but as a daily threat.
Born and raised in Chicago, she told me she now fears walking her dog in her own neighborhood. One day, she saw a vehicle with darkened windows and men in face masks idling at the corner, and her body went numb with terror. Her nightmare is simple and devastating: being detained and her beloved dog left abandoned in the street—lost, alone, frightened, and at risk. I thought about my cats. What would happen to them if I were taken away without warning?
She also worries about her elderly father, a longtime U.S. citizen born in Mexico, who might be “disappeared” from the local drugstore parking lot—a common staging area for ICE—while picking up a prescription for her mother. We both paused, stunned that we were even having that conversation—in 2025, in a quiet college town just north of Chicago. Two Americans strategizing about how to keep a family member safe from his own government.
These are the conversations happening in therapy now. Where we once talked about family dysfunction, we now talk about national dysfunction.
I sat there, horrified. As a 70-year-old white woman, I’m not completely safe—but I am far safer than someone with nothing more than a Hispanic surname. My fear is cushioned by privilege, and I know it.
Some of my clients have reached a grim acceptance. They understand things may get worse before they get better. But they’ve chosen to stay—to live their lives, find moments of joy, and resist in the ways they can.
Others are still in denial. Some are furious. Many are bargaining, parsing headlines like tea leaves, debating what Democrats did wrong and what they could still fix.
Collectively, we’re grieving the country we thought we lived in—where decency and democracy once felt like birthrights, not privileges that could vanish overnight.
Many months ago, my aunt and I visited my hometown in the far west suburbs. Even in the 1950s and 60s, it had a large Hispanic population. My first big crush was on a boy named Fernando. We drove through the old neighborhoods, past the city pool and my grade school, before stopping at my grandparents’ house—the heart of my childhood.
The yard, once plain grass, is now alive with bushes, flowers, statues, and colorful pinwheels. A few cars sat in the driveway. I parked across the street and hopped out to take a couple of photos. As I snapped away, a woman jumped from one of the cars, demanding to know what I was doing. She looked Latina. My heart sank—I had frightened her. I went into explanation overdrive, offering my name, even my driver’s license, anything to prove I wasn’t a threat—just a sentimental old fool on a trip down memory lane. My aunt chimed in, offering my grandparents’ names and the dates they lived there. I described the layout of the rooms, still burned into my memory.
She relaxed eventually, and we chatted a bit. But as I drove away, I couldn’t shake the unease. I had scared her unintentionally—but she had every reason to be afraid. That anyone in this country lives like that—constantly vigilant, even on their own front lawn—is an indictment of what we’ve become.
I’m not as far along in my grief as some of my clients. I cycle through the stages: shock, anger, despair, fleeting hope. Some days I want to fight; others, I want to hide. But what’s hardest is realizing how much hatred was always here, hiding in plain sight, now emboldened by power. It’s abuse on a national scale—gaslighting raised to a governing principle.
I still feel guilty for not marching. But maybe being in my chair that day was its own form of resistance. Seven million Americans turned out for the second No Kings March—a surge from the first rally. Future marches will be even bigger.
And if I can’t be there, I’ll be here. Because the front lines aren’t only in the streets. They’re in classrooms, clinics, kitchens—and therapy rooms—where people are quietly helping one another stay grounded, stay human, and not surrender entirely to despair.
When people like the aforementioned are killed, through direct violence or abject abuse and neglect, the loss ripples far beyond the immediate circle of grief. It enters into all of us. My work now—our work—is to make room for that grief without letting it harden into numbness or fear. To bear witness. To help people hold on to the fragile, stubborn belief that this country can still choose something better than what it is becoming.
This essay was written in the days following the second No King’s rally but updated after the killing of Renee Nicole Good.
Kvetchin With Gretchen 