Surviving the Work: How Immigrant-Serving Service Providers Are Caring for Themselves amid Crisis

Background: In the current immigration enforcement climate, the social service workforce that supports immigrant communities is operating under conditions of continuous, systemic crisis. Federal and state funding freezes, organizational closures, mass layoffs, and surging client needs have placed frontline service providers under extraordinary strain. While prior research has documented the stressors facing the service provider population, far less attention has been given to the protective strategies that providers themselves employ to cope and respond to these challenges. As the field approaches potential systemic workforce collapse, understanding what actually protects providers from burnout has urgent practical and policy significance. This study examines the self-care and resilience practices reported by immigration service providers across three states, identifying what works, what organizations are doing well, and what structural barriers continue to undermine provider wellbeing.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 82 frontline service providers, including attorneys, case managers, community health workers, and organizational leaders across California, Texas, and New Mexico. Participants reflected significant professional diversity: 34.1% had 6–10 years of experience, and 63.4% worked with immigrant clients daily. The sample was predominantly female (80.5%) and Latinx (67.1%), and half self-identified as immigrants. Interview data were analyzed using thematic analysis, focusing on provider-described protective behaviors, organizational wellness practices, structural enablers and barriers, and the interplay between personal identity and self-care. Supplemental quantitative data from the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) and Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (STSS) provided a contextual frame for interpreting self-reported self-care effectiveness.

Results: Against a backdrop of universal burnout (100% of participants exceeding the OLBI high exhaustion threshold), three domains of self-care and resilience emerged. First, boundary-setting was the strongest protective individual-level factor..Providers who maintained firm work-life boundaries consistently reported lower burnout. Second, organizational wellness structure made a difference; structured self-care time, separate from paid time off, reflective supervision, wellness stipends, peer decompression spaces, and coalition building across organizations all served protective functions. Third, many providers, particularly those of color and from immigrant backgrounds, drew on culturally grounded, embodied, and spiritual self-care practices reflecting an understanding of wellness rooted in connection to land, culture, and community rather than individualistic clinical frameworks. Meaning, purpose, and “righteous rage” at current injustices served as sources of resilience. Barriers were equally prominent: job insecurity made self-care psychologically difficult, and immigrant providers faced the additional burden that the immigration climate followed them into their personal lives, making decompression hard to do. Several described health consequences, including weight loss, medication increases, and clinical depression diagnoses.

Conclusion: Providers are caring for themselves, creatively and resiliently, often without adequate organizational support. The findings underscore that self-care cannot remain an individual responsibility when stressors are structural and relentless. Organizational leaders and social work educators must embed wellness infrastructure as a standard of care: dedicated self-care time, reflective supervision, identity-affirming peer spaces, and culturally responsive programming. This study offers concrete, evidence-informed recommendations for sustaining the immigrant-serving workforce through ongoing policy crises, and argues that doing so is both an ethical obligation and a prerequisite for organizational survival.