People Who Were Deported Want to be SEEN and HEARD
“Broken Hope: Deportation and the Road Home” Highlights Their Experiences, Contributions, and Hopes for Return
Watch the webinar recording and engage with the digital press release.
Washington, DC – “Broken Hope: Deportation and the Road Home” is a new book and issue brief combining information from 255 interviews with deported immigrants; external research; political and legal context; and recommendations for the Biden administration, Congress, the media, advocates, and philanthropy to help families and communities heal. Deportations to Africa and Muslim-majority nations skyrocketed during the Trump administration. “Broken Hope” highlights the disproportionate, harmful impact of detention of deportation on Black immigrants and their loved ones.
Ohio Immigrant Alliance hosted a webinar about “Broken Hope” with Lynn Tramonte and Maryam Sy of OHIA and Suma Setty of CLASP. Saidu Sow and Demba Jobe, deported to Mauritania and The Gambia respectively, participated via video recording. The webinar also featured a montage of photos of people who have returned to the U.S., as well as others still fighting to come home. More photos and videos are available in the digital press release.
“When we started the #ReuniteUS interviews, we began with people who were deported from Ohio. And we quickly saw it was like a spider web starting to form,’ said Maryam Sy, organizer with the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “People from different states, different countries reached out. We started with Mauritanian people and we quickly heard from people from other countries; people from Asia and Europe were reaching out to us because they knew that we were listening.”
Suma Setty is a senior policy analyst on the immigration and immigrant families team at the Center for Law and Social Policy. She built on a demographic profile created by Sy’s high school son, Seydi, and analyzed the information collected in these interviews. Said Setty: “There is a through line between these stories and the story that is getting a lot of attention in the media, about the border. Legal pathways like humanitarian parole and other legal pathways, they reduce and ease unlawful immigration. But in our current system, as we saw with Demba’s story, people can be simultaneously eligible for deportation as well as be eligible for a green card. This is like a pure case study in how broken our system truly is.”
Sy continued. “All of those people have something to say. Some people were deported and some people chose to leave because they were afraid of deportation. They were afraid of being taken back to horrible countries that they left in the first place. This book is about those stories. And it’s about asking ourselves, what we can do to make a change. Because deportations unfortunately are still happening. And I believe that we can do something.”
Setty summarized external research and Department of Homeland Security data for “Broken Hope.” She pointed out that, “average annual deportations were larger under Obama than under Trump. However, there were huge disparities based on country of origin and region of origin. Removals to African nations increased by 74%, and deportations to Caribbean nations increased 48% under the Trump administration. Deportations to Muslim-majority nations increased by 38%. So why is this happening? This is happening because the federal government is pouring money into immigration enforcement rather than investing in legal pathways for people to stay here.”
Written by Lynn Tramonte of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance and Suma Setty at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), “Broken Hope” is based on 255 interviews conducted by OHIA Organizer Maryam Sy between 2021 to 2023. The men and women Sy interviewed had lived in 20+ states and were deported to 27 countries, primarily in Africa. They had a median U.S. residency of 17 years, as well as families, businesses, homes, and careers they were forced to leave behind. They told Sy they envision a world where they can come back to the lives they left, and that they want to be seen and heard in the immigration debate.
“Broken Hope” is part of OHIA’s #ReuniteUS campaign, advocating to change policy so that more people who were deported can return. A majority of the people Sy interviewed are Black, Muslim men. Not only did they contribute their experiences to the book, but they also added photos and audio and video recordings. These rich details and so much more are found between the pages of “Broken Hope.”
CLASP is a founding member of the Children Thrive Action Network (CTAN), which held nine listening sessions with immigrant parents around the country, including people whose spouses were deported. Read the report from these sessions, “If the Parents are Okay, The Children are Okay,” to learn more about immigrant parents’ and young people’s concerns.
“Broken Hope” is available as an Executive Summary in English and French (written and audio), and Fulani (audio only). Read the shorter issue brief at https://bit.ly/BrokenHopeBrief. Download the free ebook at https://www.reunite.us/read, or purchase a paperback at bit.ly/BuyBrokenHope.
Watch the “Broken Hope” webinar and view additional videos and photos related to the project at https://bit.ly/42kA6fc.
###