Twenty Years of Community Power!

Happy Lunar New Year! Wishing you health and healing this year of the yang fire horse. 

As we enter our 20th anniversary year, our work at CERI has never felt more meaningful - or more necessary. Every day, our clients, neighbors, friends, and families are navigating the mental health impacts of hostile rhetoric, harmful policies, and increasingly violent immigration enforcement.

This is why we are so moved by community-based responses happening across the country, including here locally! We are proud that Alameda County’s Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to pass ICE Free Zones on January 27th, where CERI staff and community members showed up to speak about its importance.

In the midst of witnessing the horrific state-sanctioned violence being carried out in Minneapolis, one of our therapists wrote this testimonial to deliver to the Alameda Board of Supervisors - on how CERI community members have been impacted by the news: 

“The events of the past few weeks have been extremely triggering and activating for our community members. Their symptoms of PTSD have worsened as ICE violence escalates and undermines the sense of safety they have spent so long cultivating. They fear going outside, gathering with their loved ones, traveling, and going to their important appointments. This violence - abducting our people from their homes, separating families, and murdering observers is a crisis with far-reaching implications. Just today I heard from a client that his asylum case that was scheduled for April has been delayed to September 2027. This is after 2 years of waiting as is. Speaking to him today I saw the fear in his eyes, the hopelessness setting in as he shared that he never thought something like this could happen in this country.

These past few weeks, my sessions have been heartbreaking. Our community members are scared. They’re expressing hopelessness. I’ve had to safety plan across multiple sessions, and make plans with people about what would happen to their children if they were to be disappeared.

I urge the board of supervisors to vote yes on these resolutions to affirm to our immigrant community that we want them here, we want them safe, and that ICE is not welcome on our streets. I want the people I serve to have faith that the healing work they’ve been doing for so long was not for naught, that their sense of safety can’t be taken away overnight.”

This is the work. From individual therapy sessions to Board of Supervisors meetings, as we mark 20 years of CERI, we remain committed to showing up. The challenges before us are real, and so is our strength. Together, with our community, partners, and supporters like you, we will continue to build spaces of healing and resistance.