It’s been three weeks now, and I can’t get the picture of Monsanto Maler out of my mind. A Haitian immigrant of Springfield, Ohio, Maler was ordered to report to an ICE facility 70 miles away in the Cincinnati suburbs after his Temporary Protected Status expired at the end of July. There, on Sunday, Aug. 9, he was fitted with an ankle monitor pending deportation.
As he walked out of the facility, he fell to the ground, sobbing with grief and humiliation. A freelance photographer caught the moment, and the video was obtained by CNN. He fled Haiti in 2023 after he was viciously attacked in Cap-Haïtien, Maler said through an interpreter.
“The reason why I fled the country,” he said (in the video seen at right) “is because I was not feeling safe because I’ve been even chased by other people and [they] hit me on the back of the head.”
According to Stephen Starr, a Irish freelance journalist who was on the scene, the gang violence left “a large, visible scar” on the right side of Maler’s head. Starr described the moment in an article published in The Guardian:
Grief-stricken and unable to hold himself up, he collapsed on the ground, his dozens of immigration documents, which a moment before had been carefully packed under his arm, strewn across the concrete. His face was full of confusion, his eyes bewildered. His American dream had ended in humiliation and despondency, with a metal box tied around his ankle.
“I feel depressed, physically, mentally. I feel dizzy,” he said through an interpreter.
A crowd estimated at 700 protesters gathered outside the nondescript ICE building in suburban Blue Ash early Sunday morning. Starr, who had come down from Springfield with Pastor Carl Ruby and Viles Dorsainvil, who heads the Haitian Support Center there, described the scene:
At 7.40am, the first Haitian national, a man dressed all in black, arrived for his appointment. By 8am three people, including Maler, had arrived. Thirty minutes later, a Haitian man and woman arrived and were given communion by Ruby, who had brought a vat of wine, bread and a large gold cross.
“We want to give them the message that Jesus is with them,” said Ruby.
“The Bible isn’t policy, but the Bible is very clear that God loves immigrants. It teaches that they are to have access to justice.”
Another video clip, posted to the Freedom News wire service and published by The Grio, shows Maler receiving the Eucharist outside the ICE building while protesters sing in the background. (The song sounds a lot like “Hold On” by Heidi Wilson, frequently heard during the Trump regime’s paramilitary operation in Minneapolis.) Even from the safety of central Illinois, 340 miles away on I-72 and I-74, the whole scene is heartbreaking.
More than that, I think it qualifies as what mental health professionals inelegantly term a PMIE, a “potentially morally injurious event.” In a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology, Tyler VanderWeele and Jennifer Wortham of Harvard’s public health school define moral injury as:
Moral Injury: Persistent distress that arises from a personal experience that disrupts or threatens: (a) one’s sense of the goodness of oneself, of others, of institutions, or of what are understood to be higher powers, or (b) one’s beliefs or intuitions about right and wrong, or good and evil.
Research into moral injury began in the 1960s with combat veterans, nurses, first responders and witnesses of a PMIE. In a related development, the American Psychiatric Association last year expanded its diagnostic list of “Other Conditions That May Be a Focus of Clinical Attention” in the DSM-5-TR to include moral problems.
While the diagnostic criteria and behavioral effects of moral injury are still evolving in the clinical literature, some mental health professionals have written n popular media like Psychology Today and Time magazine. A week after the 2024 election in an article titled “Moral Injury Meets Politics” in Psychology Today, MaryCatherine McDonald of Holy Cross College said:
[…] Regardless of what side of the aisle you find yourself on, it has become undeniably true that what we thought was aisle is not an aisle at all, it is a gaping abyss. The things that separate us are not about policies or economics. The things that separate us are about hatred, violence, and dehumanization.
We believed we were the United States. This election has proven that we are not united. And this deep sense of unease is not just about who won or lost; it’s about a growing recognition that the rules of the game, the structures of meaning and morality we thought we could rely on, might be crumbling and might have already crumbled.
McDonald’s “growing recognition” was prescient. In the year and a half since Trump took office, the roughly half of US voters who didn’t support his policies – including mass deportations, massive budget cuts and an end to “woke” DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) iniatives – found them even worse in practice than they had anticipated.
By April of this year, clinical psychologist Michael Valdovinos grew alarmed by what he (or a headline writer for Time magazine) called “America’s Moral Injury Pandemic.” Of Mexican-American heritage himself, he cited immigrant family separations, people unable to get medical supplies such as insulin to loved ones in ICE detention and the feelings that arise when “Masked men shatter your neighbor’s car windows and force them into unmarked vehicles. You fumble with your phone to film what’s happening, powerless to stop it.”
For some Americans, these situations are not hypotheticals. For others, they arrive as virtual shock waves—grainy videos of detention, headlines about American citizens killed during enforcement actions, stories of infants and toddlers incarcerated despite being born here.
Whether you are directly involved or watching from a distance, these events land somewhere inside you. They destabilize us not simply because they are violent or tragic but because they betray some fundamental aspect of personal conscience. A line that once felt secure now appears to have broken. Codes of conduct you’ve always relied on are twisted or ignored.
This psychological rupture is a recognized clinical condition, and it has a name: moral injury. [Links in the original.]
Later (Tuesday, Sept. 7): That’s as far as I got last week, before complications arose in: (a) my private life, as we made one of our irregularly scheduled visits to the emergency room at HSHS St. John’s Hospital; (b) nationwide, as Trump’s US Postal Service made preparations for shenanigans in the Nov. 3 midterms that would make a Chicago alderman blush; and (c) on the world stage as Trump sought headlines in his off-again, on-agan war-that-isn’t-a-war with Iran and he drew maps planting the US flag over Iceland, Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and a couple of French possessions in the Caribbean (on social media if not in reality).
For the record, I’m writing this update the day after Labor Day, when the campagn season raditionally begins. And I’m feeling a little better.
Over the weekend, I started to see little clusters of yard signs blossoming here and there when I drive around town. In a state capital town like Springfield, these clusters are a pretty good indicator of where a precinct committeeman lives, and I take their appearance as an encouraging sign.
MaryCatherine McDonald of Holy Cross College says something I think is wise and healing. First, she says in a check-list of several steps to promote healing, we have to grief our loss of faith in institutions we can no longer fully believe in:
Acknowledge the Loss: Before building something new, we must grieve what was lost. This grief is not just for broken institutions or failed leaders but also for our own shattered sense of security and certainty. Mourning is an act of acknowledgment: the structures failed you, and your feelings of betrayal are valid.
Loss of faith in old institutions and values isn’t necessarily a bad thing, she adds. “What will anchor your moral compass now? Perhaps the chaos has clarified values you didn’t realize mattered so much. Justice. Kindness. Accountability.” Chaos can also present an opportunity:
Lean into the Existential Crisis: After the grieving, there is a grand opportunity in realizing that meaning does not inherently lie in structures outside of us. This is because it reveals something that was always true which is that we do not find meaning, we create meaning. And when we create a meaning structure that does not work, or does not serve us, we are free – nay, obligated – to create new ones.
I’ll have to sit with that for a while. I grew up in the waning days of legally mandated Jim Crow, and I remember how subtle and complicated it was to reconconsider my values (even as a white “Southern moderate”) in light of the civil rights movement. Somehow in the last 10 years or so, we’ve gone right back there again, with racially coded language about cat- and dog-eating immigrants instead of the racial slurs of the 1950s and 60s but also a disturbing little whiff of ein Volk ein Reich ethnonationalism I don’t remember from Jim Crow 1.0.
So McDonald doesn’t answer my question — what can I do? — but I think she gives me a framework for discerning an answer. And I’m afraid I’ll have plenty of opportunity to use it.
References
“Haitian immigrant in tears after receiving ankle monitor,” CNN, Aug. 10, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IgEivUOJO4Y.
MaryCatherine McDonald, “Moral Injury Meets Politics,” Psychology Today, Nov. 12, 2024 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hope-circuit/202411/moral-injury-meets-politics.
Bolarinwa Oladeji, “Video of Haitian immigrant’s collapse outside ICE office draws national outrage,” The Grio, Aug. 10, 2026 https://thegrio.com/2026/08/10/haitian-man-ankle-monitor-ice-ohio-tps-ends/.
Stephen Starr, “In Ohio, Haitians’ American dream shatters as ICE prepares to deport them,” Guardian, Aug. 10, 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/12/ohio-haitian-immigrants-ice.
Tyler J VanderWeele, Jennifer S Wortham, Lindsay B Carey, Brendan W Case, Richard G Cowden, Charlotte Duffee, Kate Jackson-Meyer, Francis Lu, Seth A Mattson, Robert Noah Padgett, John R Peteet, Jonathan Rutledge, Xavier Symons and Harold G Koenig, “Moral trauma, moral distress, moral injury, and moral injury disorder: definitions and assessments,” Frontiers in Psychology, March 5, 2025, in National Library of Medicine https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11919856/.
Michael Valdovino, “America’s Moral Injury Pandemic,” Time, April 9, 2026 https://time.com/article/2026/04/09/america-moral-injury-pandemic/.
Heidi Wilson, “Hold On,” Rise Up Singing https://www.riseupsinging.org/songs/hold-heidi-wilson.
[Uplinked Sept. 7, 2026]
Ordinary Time 
This is good.
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