Quick Take

• The Education Justice Project has published A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation since 2018.
• The 172-page guide addresses detention and deportation issues and is for all people who are undocumented in the US. A New Path’s take-home message is “knowledge is power.”
• Requests for the guide have surged dramatically since the November U.S. presidential election.

Lee Ragsdale knows the plight of people who are detained and deported well. Her husband, Erick Nava, came to the U.S. with his family when he was four months old. As a teenager living in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago, Nava was arrested, falsely charged, and wrongfully convicted. This was shortly after the reign of Jon Burge, a commander in the Chicago Police Department who was found guilty of lying about directly participating in or implicitly approving the torture of at least 118 people in police custody to force false confessions.

Nava spent 15 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Once released, he was shuttled around to detention facilities in four states for three weeks, never knowing where he was going or for how long he would be there.

“He never even knew when he would get a bathroom break,” says Ragsdale, director of the Reentry Resource Program for the Education Justice Project (EJP), an initiative of the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “They drove Erick and others who were being deported some 20 hours in a van, put them on a plane, picked up some more people in Alabama, flew them to Texas, all without giving him any kind of knowledge about where they were even going.”

Finally arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, Nava and the others were dropped off.

“They just opened the gate and said, ‘There’s Mexico, good luck,’” Ragsdale says. “It’s inhumane. Culturally and linguistically, he was American. He’s from Chicago. He was being deported to what was for him a foreign country.”

Deportation Numbers

Though it was cold comfort to Nava, he was hardly alone. From 2008-2022, more than 4 million Mexican migrants have been deported from the United States. That’s nearly 29,000 a year. During that same period, many thousands of other Mexican migrants returned to Mexico, forcibly or voluntarily, because of family obligations, unfavorable market conditions, and stricter enforcement of U.S. immigration policy and laws.

Ragsdale and Nava have lived in Mexico for 12 years now. They’ve had to scramble to find suitable work that paid them appropriately. “I had a job at the most prestigious university in Mexico,” Ragsdale recalls. “I have two master’s degrees and was being paid the equivalent of $10 an hour. Erick was working at a language school, but we both shifted to working online. Anything making U.S. dollars is going to be more profitable than almost anything you can do here in Mexico, unfortunately.”

Need for New Resource

Ragsdale began working for EJP in 2010. The project’s reentry resource program publishes three reentry guides: Mapping Your Future: A Guide to Successful Reentry in Illinois, Mapping Your Future: National Edition, and A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation. It was her idea to create the latter guide. All the guides are available in both English and Spanish.

“I approached Rebecca [Ginsburg, director of EJP] and said we need a resource for people who are deported,” Ragsdale says. “It doesn’t do people any good to send them a Mapping Your Future edition when they’re being dropped off at the border of Mexico.”

Ragsdale said people need to “be connected to migrant shelters at the border. They need to know how to navigate the bureaucracy in Mexico, they need to know how to get their vital documents, and they need to know how to use the skills that they learned in the U.S. to get jobs here. It’s an entirely different type of reentry, and there’s a huge need for it.”

Ginsburg gave Ragsdale the green light on the new resource. The first edition of A New Path was published in 2018.

Expanding Scope and Audience

The guide, which is updated every two years, first focused solely on people in prison in Illinois. The current edition (2023-24) underwent significant revisions. “At first, we were writing it for people connected to EJP,” Ragsdale explains. “But it wasn’t necessary to make it specific to Illinois because deportation is a federal process.”

The guide now applies to anyone in the U.S. who faces the possibility of being deported. But its focus goes beyond that audience.

 “We took out any assumption that the reader would be deported,” she says. “We opened it up to anyone who is undocumented in the U.S., whether they were in prison or not, and we made it a national resource. The audience shifted to someone who’s never been in prison, maybe a mother with three kids. They’re all undocumented, and they need to know how to plan for a possible deportation. They need to know how to respond if ICE comes to the door.”

Surging Requests for A New Path

Generally, distribution numbers for A New Path hover somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 copies a year. “These last two years, we’ve seen an uptick,” Ragsdale says. “We’ve been around 2,000 each of the last few years.”

That uptick turned into a huge surge following the U.S. presidential election in November 2024.

“We went from receiving a couple of requests each week for A New Path to over 200 right after the election,” she notes. Those requests, she adds, have remained steady ever since.

“People are fearful,” Ragsdale says. “I have a friend who’s an immigration attorney in the U.S., but she lives here in Mexico. The day after the election, she texted me, ‘Your guide is going to be in such high demand now. Are you ready?’ And I thought, what’s she talking about? That’s not going to happen.”

Turns out the attorney was prescient.

The requests began pouring in:

“I’m contacting you today in hopes of being able to receive a copy of A New Path . . . I’m preparing myself for a return home after 24 years of living in this beautiful country. I’d like to learn more about my deportation to Mexico.”

“Hi, my husband is in danger of possibly getting deported. Could I please get a physical copy of the book sent to me?”

“Hello, I’m currently incarcerated in Mississippi and am going to be deported to Mexico . . . After my deportation, I’d like to keep studying and have a career, maybe in education or health in Mexico. I’ve always liked to help people.”

“Hello, my husband has a finalized deportation order in absentia, and I just saw someone post about your book on TikTok. With the new administration coming in, I would like to inform myself about what I should do if my husband were to be detained!”

“I’ve been incarcerated since 2007, but this year, I’ll complete my sentence. Another prisoner gave me your address and told me you have information about deportation. I’m from Guerrero, Mexico, and I don’t have anyone who can pick me up at the border.”

“I have a few students in my class this year that might be affected by new administration policies, and I felt it would be good to have a copy or two on hand to give away if needed. Is it possible to send one copy in English and one in Spanish?”

Devastating Effects of Deportation

The effects of detention and deportation are devastating, Ragsdale says.

“Detention and deportation deprive people of their liberty, first of all,” she explains. “People are separated from loved ones and removed from their communities. Some of the content covered in A New Path is just heart-wrenching. There’s a section that guides people who are undocumented and have minor children on how to set up a caregiver for your child if you’re going to be detained, how to put together a file with their school records, their medical records, emergency phone numbers.”

Mexican school records reveal that more than 550,000 U.S.-born children of Mexican migrants live in Mexico.

“The effect on families is huge,” Ragsdale notes. “I’m part of a group of American citizen women whose spouses are Mexican men who have been deported here. They tell me these horror stories of not being able to get their children in school because they don’t have the right documents. There are an estimated 200,000 US citizen children living in Mexico who are undocumented. The paperwork is complex and cumbersome, it’s really expensive, and there’s a lot of legal stuff involved to be able to enroll your kids in school. Not to mention the isolation. Lots of times, the kids don’t speak Spanish. They’re bullied in Mexican schools. It’s a trauma.”

Contributing Members of Society

Adding to the trauma is the indignity that the people being deported are paying taxes despite the common misconception that they are not.

“They’re contributing members of our communities who have been here for decades, who contribute to the economy, who pay taxes, pay into social security and Medicare, and in many cases, they’re not reaping the benefits because they’re undocumented,” Ragsdale says.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants contribute about $11.7 billion annually in state and local taxes (as of 2020). At the federal level, undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $23.6 billion in payroll taxes in 2018 alone, according to the Social Security Administration.

A Comprehensive, Powerful, and Unique Guide

 A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation is a 172-page resource that helps readers fight deportation or get ready for deportation or return to their home country. It informs them how to get their basic needs met in their country of origin, including how to find jobs and schools. It includes a section on healing, moving forward, and building healthy relationships and offers resources for returning to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. It offers an array of valuable resources and forms for use in the U.S. and other countries.

“It’s an incredibly comprehensive and powerful guide that is very much in demand now because of the current climate,” Ragsdale says. “We see it as this potentially traumatic transition that an individual can be empowered to navigate more successfully.”

A New Path also offers something that similar guides don’t.

“There are other deportation planning guides that exist,” Ragsdale notes, “but what’s unique about ours is the ‘Life After Deportation’ section. I’ve never seen more than a couple of pages on this before. We have about 75 pages on Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. This is important because if you haven’t lived in the country since you were a child and suddenly, you’re thrust back into it with no family and no connections, things like getting your IDs and documents are super complicated.”

“Knowledge is Power”

Ragsdale says that the guide’s take-home message is that knowledge is power.

“Knowing what to expect can put an individual in a position of slightly more power than they otherwise might have been in when facing this traumatic process,” she says. “The most important section might be the ‘Know Your Rights’ section. When an ICE officer appears at your house, and you know you don’t have to open the door to them unless they have a warrant signed by a judge, that’s power. We want people to understand their rights.”

A New Path includes a “red card” that people can print and carry with them:

You have constitutional rights:

• DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR if an immigration agent is knocking on the door.

• DO NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS from an immigration agent if they try to talk to you. You have the right to remain silent.

• DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING without first speaking to a lawyer. You have the right to speak with a lawyer.

• If you are outside of your home, ask the agent if you are free to leave, and if they say yes, leave calmly.

• GIVE THIS CARD TO THE AGENT. If you are inside your home, show the card through the window or slide it under the door.

(Source: https://www.ilrc.org/red-cards)

“The card helps you defend yourself from an officer who might be looking to detain you without following proper protocols,” Ragsdale says.

New Guide in 2025

The next edition of A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation will be coming out in the summer of 2025.

“We’re behind on the research for that,” Ragsdale notes, “but that’s probably a good thing because we want to see what happens with the new administration and what information we want to update. There’s also a new administration in Mexico.”

The proposed deportation tactics, Ragsdale says, are “especially cruel.”

“We saw a lot of family separation under the first Trump administration,” she says. “Currently, places like schools and churches are considered sensitive areas, and generally ICE avoids raids there, but there is fear that that will no longer be the de facto policy and that it’s really going to lead to terror for a lot of our undocumented neighbors.

“If we can provide a resource that can help them defend themselves and also help them prepare, then we’re honored to be able to do that.”

Download a copy of A New Path from the Education Justice Project. The guide is available in English or Spanish.