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.
Broken Hope: Deportation and the Road Home is 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.
As a result of deportation, individuals and families, including young children and people of advanced age, experience:
Economic insecurity, including lack of access to food, housing, health care, and childcare; serious mental health problems, resulting in self-harm and long-term damage; Adverse Childhood Experiences, toxic stress, and poor physical health; disruption of education and career goals; persecution, exploitation, homelessness, and a lack of safety; the stress and financial strain of becoming a "single parent" unwillingly, and overnight; feeling powerless to help the people they love; and fractured bonds and relationships.
But it doesn't have to be this way. The impact of deportation is a human-made problem, and the solution is also in the hands of people.
Author Biography:
Lynn Tramonte move words like fingers move crochet thread. Loop, hook, pull. Tension and slack, creating something new, useful-and beautiful-from simple string. After twenty years working for national immigration advocacy organizations, Tramonte launched a communications consulting practice, Anacaona. Anacaona helps clients tell stories that compel people to see and feel our shared humanity, and act to make social change.Anacaona specializes in advocacy communications strategy and planning; editing and writing; coaching and training in writing, media relations, and narrative. Tramonte also directs the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, and serves on the boards of Justice Action Center and Babel Box Theatre-claiming her progressive values, midwestern roots, and the power of art as pleasure, connector, and teacher. Tramonte's work has appeared in publications as diverse as the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Univision, Guardian, Columbus Dispatch, and Ideastream Public Media. She is a 2018 Marshall Memorial Fellow with the German Marshall Fund. Suma Setty is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, working on their immigration and immigrant families team. Prior to CLASP, Suma worked at the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), leading and coordinating mixed-methods research studies. She worked alongside families with low incomes on topics such as paid leave, immigration enforcement, and immigrant integration. She also coordinated a needs assessment update for New Hampshire's preschool development grant and the National Council on Disability's study on Medicaid dental coverage for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She assisted with translating policy into code for NCCP's online policy analysis tool, the Family Resource Simulator, to assess the interactions between critical work supports and calculate the net resources of families with low incomes.In her work at CLASP, Suma draws from her research expertise and diverse work experience at a bilingual elementary school, a rights-based NGO in rural India, and on the campaign to pass the Affordable Care Act. She has volunteered as an adult ESL educator and continues her community engagement by raising funds for her local food pantry and the NGO in India. She holds a master's degree in public health from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in environmental studies and political science from Macalester College.
