By Lynn Tramonte and Suma Setty

What if you were forced to pack your belongings and leave your family, friends, career, home, and life behind? Could you say good-bye to everyone and everything you love, not knowing if you will see them again? That is what deportation is: permanent banishment from your home, family, friends, and job, from a life built over years. It is an extreme action that causes lasting harm to everyone it touches.

From 2022 to 2023, Maryam Sy, an organizer with the Ohio Immigrant Alliance (OHIA), spent hundreds of hours interviewing over 250 people who were deported to find out what they wanted the world to know.

“A lot of these people went through, I think, the hardest part of their life when they were deported,” she reflected. “Because it was like a broken hope, like the government broke their hope. They came to America to seek asylum for a better life.”

Immigration detention and deportation unravels lives, with crushing consequences for children, partners, parents, and communities. Broken Hope connects the experiences of individuals with studies that show these harms are universal. And it details how deportation is an extreme response to a visa problem.

This issue brief summarizes a book Broken Hope: Deportation and the Road Home, a collaboration between the OHIA and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) that highlights the experiences, hopes, and dreams of 255 people who were deported from the United States, as well as their loved ones. They are part of OHIA’s #ReuniteUS campaign, which seeks to change policy so that more people who were deported can return

Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy | CLASP, 2023. 20p.