After the viral moment fades

There have been countless incidents that have gone viral since Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Moments of horror, captured on someone’s cell phone and broadcasted through social media for all of us to witness. Scenes of car windows being smashed in, people abducted at medical appointments and court houses, and disappeared from their homes and neighborhood street corners. Moments of intense fear, which we can then see through our devices and experience a sliver of the terror.

Eventually, the cell phone stops its recording. Our ability to witness the event comes to an end. And as that viral incident fades from our collective memory, five more horrific videos replace it. We move on to the next awful event, bombarded by a constant stream of new awful events provided to us by an administration hell bent on causing the most harm possible. And succeeding in doing so.

But the people in the viral videos don’t get to move on. They live forever with the trauma of whatever violence the Trump administration has perpetrated on them and their families. We don’t typically get to see what happens after the incident. And I don’t think we have even begun to comprehend the enormity of the lasting harm.

Here is just one example of what happened after the cell phones stopped recording.

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On May 25th, 2025, ICE violently abducted Rosane Ferreira-de Oliveira in Worcester, Massachusetts — a community not far from where I am sitting now. The incident was chaotic, with protestors and upwards of 30 police officers on the scene. The woman’s teenage daughter was arrested as she tried to stop federal agents from taking her mother away. Bystanders took multiple videos, and the abduction made both the national news and viral moments on social media platforms. People across the country expressed their outrage, and locally, Worcester residents staged protests and demanded answers. For a while, the incident became the story/moment/video exemplifying the profound harm of the Trump administration’s terrorizing of immigrants.

But of course, more videos and moments and stories kept pouring in from communities across the country. The incident in Worcester became another horrific situation in an endless flood of horrific situations that have rained down upon us since the inauguration. That particular viral moment has faded from public consciousness, simply because no one can hold all the harm. Our brains and hearts were not built for that.

But as that viral moment has faded, the trauma has not.

After Rosane Ferreira-de Oliveira was abducted, her two teenaged daughters (17 and 13) were placed in foster care. I can tell you as a clinician who used to work with foster children that there is profound trauma in being separated from one’s family and placed in an out-of-home setting. The trauma hasn’t ended there — both of these girls are now gone. The 17 year old apparently went to Brazil to live with another relative, but the 13 year old is simply gone.

The 13 year old, last seen in Worcester on July 20th, was apparently given a ride to Maple Shade, New Jersey in an arrangement made on Facebook. A woman from Philadelphia was visiting her sister in Worcester when she answered a query in a Facebook group asking for someone to transport “his sister” from Massachusetts to Philadelphia for $200. The woman obliged, not realizing until after the fact that she was bringing a missing child across state lines. She never saw the man who requested the assistance, and was never paid the money. This child hasn’t been seen since.

I read about what happened to this very vulnerable girl — a girl made motherless by the federal government — and I am so worried about this child’s welfare. Not only has she experienced the trauma of losing access to her mom and being placed in a foster home, I shudder to think of what trauma she might be experiencing now.

It goes without saying that none of this would have happened had our murderous federal administration not kidnapped her mother off the streets of her home city, leaving her without parent or protection. I hope with every fiber of my being that she is found safe and found immediately. She is a child at a crucial developmental stage, a child that needs her mother, and a child that absolutely shouldn’t be out in the world on her own. A child, who after all of this will never be the same child again. How could she be? Even if she came home tomorrow and was reunited with her (still incarcerated) mother, that will never erase the impact of all she has been through.

People have moved on from the Worcester viral moment. They are now watching reels of violent beatings at the hands of federal agents from Los Angeles to DC, where the military vehicles lumber down streets that should be filled with summer visitors and city dwellers. But instead we see videos of a delivery worker being tased and we read stories of an immigrant killed on a highway in a desperate attempt to outrun ICE. After every violent abduction, after every injury or death that captures our attention, there is the aftermath. An aftermath of hurt and harm that we don’t get to see on our Instagram feeds, but it is there. Palpable and too immense to even begin to measure. So much trauma.

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If you have never read Caitlin Dickerson’s investigation into Trump’s policy of family separation during his first term, I implore you to do so. It’s not an easy read. Published in the Atlantic just over three years ago, the piece is a searing condemnation of the profound cruelty of the policy, and an indictment of every person involved in its design and implementation. From the piece:

“It’s been said of other Trump-era projects that the administration’s incompetence mitigated its malevolence; here, the opposite happened. A flagrant failure to prepare meant that courts, detention centers, and children’s shelters became dangerously overwhelmed; that parents and children were lost to each other, sometimes many states apart; that four years later, some families are still separated—and that even many of those who have been reunited have suffered irreparable harm.”

Now in 2025, we have a new era of Trump’s malevolence that is causing yet more irreparable harm, and on a scale even more unfathomable than during Trump 1.0.

Don’t turn away. And don’t let others turn away either.

In her powerful piece, Caitlin Dickerson reflects on the scores of people in the Trump administration “who were so many layers of abstraction away from the reality of screaming children being pulled out of their parent’s arms that they could hide from the human consequences of what they were doing.”

We cannot let anyone hide from the reality of the trauma they are willfully causing. When Trump officials talk about “policy” we have to talk about people. When they espouse their fractured and fabricated definition of public safety we have to talk about how none of this keeps anyone safe — quite the opposite. When they go on and on about America First we talk about how the last thing America should do is willfully hurt our residents.

People have every right to disagree with a policy, and every right to disagree with how this country has handled immigration. But people have no right to hurt immigrants. The way we hold people in power accountable to the harm they are causing is to name it, loudly and frequently. We have to tell the stories not captured on a reel. And then we have to demand an end to the policies and practices that are destroying very real people — and very real children.