Community Resistance to Immigration Enforcement as an Anti-Oppressive, Trauma-Informed Resilience Process: An Integrated Ecological Framework

PURPOSE: Immigration enforcement affects more than the individuals directly detained or removed; it reorganizes family relationships, institutional participation, and community life. This article introduces the Integrated Ecological Framework for Community Trauma, Resilience, and Resistance (IEF-CTRR) to unify forced migration, trauma-informed care, anti-oppressive social work, community resilience, and collective resistance into a single ecological account. METHOD: As a conceptual model, the IEF-CTRR builds upon but remains distinct from the Resilience-Enhancing Stress Model (RESM) developed by Roberta Greene and colleagues, utilizing RESM's resilience-enhancing orientation to map broader structural dynamics. CONCEPTUALIZATION: The IEF-CTRR conceptualizes immigration enforcement as structural violence that generates cumulative community trauma, while positioning trauma-informed and culturally responsive services as tools to strengthen protective relationships. Under the framework, collective resistance is understood as a vital enactment of collective capacity through mutual aid, rights education, accompaniment, organizing, and structural advocacy. The framework proposes, rather than assumes, that resilience and resistance reinforce one another under conditions of safety, shared power, cultural responsiveness, and sustained care. DISCUSSION: The framework highlights unequal exposure to enforcement across racialized, ethnic, legal-status, and socioeconomic groups. Ultimately, it provides actionable, multi-level implications for contemporary social work practice, policy development, academic education, and empirical research.