By Natalie Skownd, Kff Health News
Siltthorne, Colorado – When Adolfo Román García -Ramírez returns home on the evening of his quarter work in a grocery store in this mountain city of Central Colorado, he sometimes rethinks to his childhood in Nicaragua. The adults, he remembers, frightened children with stories from the “Bruja Mona” or the “monkey witch”. Enter too far in the dark, told him, and you might get the giant mongeous monkey to snatch that lives in the shadows.
Now when García-Ramírez looks over his shoulder, they are not monster monkeys he is afraid of. They are American immigration agents and customs.
“There is this constant fear that you are walking in the street and a vehicle takes place,” said García-Ramírez, 57, in Spanish. “They say to you:“ We are ice; You are arrested “or” show me your papers “.
Silverthorne, a suburban city between the ski guys from Breckenridge and Vail, has been the house of García-Ramírez for two years. He works as a cashier with grocery store and shares an apartment with two bedrooms with four roommates.
The city of nearly 5,000 people has proven to be a welcome paradise for political exile, which was released from prison in 2023 after the authoritarian government of Nicaragua negotiated an agreement with the United States government to transfer more than 200 political prisoners to the United States.
The García-Ramírez’s parole of humanitarian release expired in February, just a few weeks after President Donald Trump published an executive decree to end the program which had enabled a temporary legal residence in the United States for hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaragans and Venezuelans, putting him in danger. García-Ramírez was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship when he came to the United States a little over a year ago, he asked for political asylum. He is still waiting for an interview.
“I cannot safely say that I am calm, or I’m fine, right now,” said García-Ramírez. “You feel dangerous, but you also feel unable to do anything to improve it.”
Vail and Breckenridge are world -renowned for their ski slopes, which attract millions of people a year. But life for the tourist labor which serves the mountain stations of Colorado is less glamorous. Residents of the Colorado mountain cities are experiencing high rates of suicide and consumption of substances, partially fueled by seasonal fluctuations in income which can cause stress to many people in the local workforce.
The Latin American communities that make up significant proportions of populations throughout the year in the mountain cities of Colorado are particularly vulnerable. A recent survey has revealed more than 4 Latin American respondents in the Western slope region, which houses many communities of the state ski resort, expressed “extremely or very serious” concern concerning the consumption of substances. It is much higher than in the county of Morgan in eastern rural colorado, which also has a considerable Latin population, and in Denver and Colorado Springs.
Throughout the state, concerns about mental health have increased among Latinos in recent years, from less than half by calling it an extremely or very serious problem in 2020 to more than three-quarters in 2023. Health workers, researchers and community members all say factors such as linguistic differences, cultural stigma and socio-economic barriers can exacerbate health problems mental and limit the capacity for access to care and socio-economic care.
“You do not get regular medical care. You work long hours, which probably means that you cannot take care of your own health,” said Asad Asad, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Stanford. “All these factors aggravate the stress that we could all feel in daily life.”
Add the costs of the life of the sky and an inadequate supply of mental health establishments in the rural tourist destinations of Colorado, and the problem becomes acute.
From now on, threats from the Trump administration of immigration raids and the imminent expulsion of anyone without American legal residence has increased stress levels. In communities around Vail, defenders believe that the vast majority of Latin residents have no legal status. The communities near Vail and Breckenridge did not experience immigration raids, but in the neighboring county of Routt, which houses Steamboat Springs, at least three people with a criminal record were detained by ICE, according to reports. Publications on social networks falsely claiming that local ice observations have further fueled concerns.
Yirka Díaz Platt, a bilingual social worker with Silverthorne from Peru, said that an omnipresent fear of deportation has made many Latin American workers withdraw in the shadows. People have started to cancel meetings in person and to avoid requesting government services that require submitting personal data, according to local health workers and defenders. At the beginning of February, some residents did not show up at work as part of a national strike “day without immigrants”. Employers wonder if they will lose precious employees for expulsion.
Some immigrants have stopped getting out of the fear of being arrested by the police. Paige Baker-Braxton, director of ambulatory behavioral health at the Vail Health System, said that she had dropped to the visits to Hispanophone patients in recent months.
“They really try to be alone. They don’t really socialize much. If you go to grocery stores, you don’t see much of our community anymore,” said Platt. “There is this fear of:” No, I don’t trust anyone for the moment. “”
Juana Amaya is not foreign to dig into her heels to survive. Amaya immigrated to the Vail of Honduras region in 1983 as a single mother of a 3 year old and 6 -month child. She spent more than 40 years working as a house cleaner in luxury condos and houses around Vail, sometimes working up to 16 hours a day. With barely enough time to finish work and care for a family at home, she said, it is often difficult for the Latinos of her community to admit when stress has become too much.
“We don’t like to talk about what we feel,” she said in Spanish, “so we don’t realize that we are dealing with a mental health problem.”
The current political climate has only aggravated things.
“It had a big impact,” she said. “There are people who have young children and wonder what they will do if they are at school and they are kidnapped somewhere, but the children remain. What are you doing?”
ASAD studied the impacts on the mental health of deportation rhetoric on Latin American communities. He co-wrote a study, published last year in the Revue Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found a degeneration of deportation rhetoric can cause increased levels of psychological distress in Latin non-citizens and even in Latin citizens.
Asad noted that the two groups can experience increased stress levels, and research has confirmed the negative consequences of the lack of documentation of a parent on the health and level of education of their children.
“The inequalities or the difficulties that we impose on their parents today are the difficulties or the inequalities with which their children inherit tomorrow,” said Asad.
Despite increased levels of fear and anxiety, Latinos living and working near Vail still find ways to support each other and ask for help. Support groups in the county of Summit, which houses Breckenridge and less than an hour’s drive from Vail, have offered mental health workshops for new immigrants and Latin women. Building Hope Summit County and Olivia’s Fund in the County of Eagle, which houses Vail, help those who without assurance to pay for a certain number of therapy sessions.
Vail Health plans to open a regional establishment in terms of hospital psychiatry in May, and the intercultural mobile Resource Alliance provides enveloping services, including behavioral health resources, directly to communities near Vail.
Back in Silverthorne, García-Ramírez, the Nicaraguan exile, takes things one day.
“If they deport me from here, I would go directly to Nicaragua,” said García-Ramírez, who said he had received a threat of verbal death from the authorities of his native country. “Honestly, I don’t think I would even last a day.”
In the meantime, he continues to enter the routine hike from his cashier work, sometimes sailing on smooth snow and dark streets after 21 hours when nightmarish thoughts on his own fate in the surface of America, García-Ramírez is concentrated on the ground under his feet.
“Come rain, shine or snow,” he said, “I walk.”
This article was published with the support of the Symposium of journalism and women (Jaws ) Fellowship in health journalism, assisted by Commonwealth Fund subsidies.
© 2025 Kff Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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