Recently leaked PowerPoint presentations from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign first-year education course reveal a pronounced left-leaning perspective on issues such as illegal immigration, race, and gender. These materials were obtained by Fox News Digital through a student whistleblower.
The slides, part of the EDUC 201 course titled “Identity and Difference in Education,” are specifically from a week 15 lesson named “Living in Uncertainty: Understanding Immigrant, Migrant, & Refugee Student Populations.” Comprising 25 slides, the lesson is said to advocate for progressive views on immigration. This course is under the instruction of Professor Gabriel Rodriguez, a faculty member in the university’s College of Education.
One of the initial slides depicts a demonstrator holding a sign proclaiming, “No human being is illegal,” setting the tone for the session’s narrative.
Another slide, labeled “Language Matters,” emphasizes the importance of language choice when discussing immigration and those who migrate. This slide encourages students to be mindful of their word usage in these contexts.
A slide from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign lecture from December 2025 features a poster of an activist holding a sign that reads, “No human being is illegal.” (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
The fifth slide is called “Language Matters,” and polices students’ language about immigration and immigrants.
“Embrace using humanizing language when talking about immigrant communities that don’t have documentation – consider using the language of ‘undocumented,’” the slide says.
“Using terms like ‘illegal immigrants,’ ‘illegal aliens,’ or ‘illegals’” is harmful, the slide says, explaining that using those terms is “dehumanizing and degrading,” that they reinforce existing negative stereotypes about immigrant communities and connect immigration with criminality, that they fuel perspectives that immigrants have no rights and that they facilitate “scapegoating communities for larger systemic issues.”
Explaining the difference between immigrants and refugees, the presentation insists, without making the distinction between illegal and legal immigrants, that, “Immigrants migrate to pursue better opportunities (e.g., work, education).” Refugees flee other countries to avoid “persecution, conflict, or violence.”
A slide from a December 2025 lecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign defines “key terms” related to immigration. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
Citing PBS News, the presentation makes the dubious claim that there are only 13.7 million illegal aliens present in the United States.
“Between 2007-2019, number of undocumented immigrants held steady at around 11 million, but since then the numbers have increased by almost 3 million,” one slide says.
A 2018 Yale study concluded that, using an “extremely conservative model,” there are between 16 million and 29 million illegal aliens in the United States, with the mean resting at 22.1 million. Those numbers were calculated before the four-year Biden administration, which was known for its open borders policy.
The presentation includes a slide titled, “Shifting Support for Immigrant/Refugee Student Populations in Schools,” and compiles headlines about negative academic impacts of stricter immigration policies. The slide reinforces that the anti-immigrant/refugee climate increases discriminatory practices, makes students feel unsafe and increases absenteeism, among other negative ramifications.
A slide from a December 2025 lecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows headlines that suggest support for illegal immigration. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
Slide 17 of the presentation features a study co-authored by Rodriguez, called, “‘This is What I go Through:’ Latinx Youth Facultades in Suburban Schools in the Era of Trump.” Rodriguez’s study examined reactions from 11 “Latinx youth” in predominantly white suburbs.
A screenshot of his study references “White supremacy and xenophobia brought on by … Trump.”
On the same slide, Rodriguez quotes one of his own study subjects, Jose, an illegal alien who is worried about being deported.
“I can’t think of any other time when my grades have mattered the most than after this election,” says Jose’s quote. “If anything happens to me at least I have good grades, [to] build on my case. Maybe if I’m excellent they won’t kick me out. The fear is so real. Right now, we don’t know what’s going to happen. My parents tell me, ‘Do well in school.’ So really, I’m worth a grade right now. I want to excel in academics. Hopefully, I’m one of the good ones.”
A slide from a December 2025 lecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign features the professor’s paper slamming Trump for “white supremacy” and “xenophobia.” (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
Further slides instruct students on how to deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a school setting.
A student in the class, who spoke with Fox News Digital on the condition of anonymity, said that these lessons aren’t just suggestions for how to teach future students.
“So in the lectures, my professor would constantly say, ‘you as educators, you as future educators, you need to do this, you need to know this,’” the student said. “That’s one thing that he says, just over and over, like ‘we as future educators,’ kind of reminding us like, oh, we need to use this when we go to teach later on.”
Fox News Digital also obtained slides from week 8 of the education course, which focused on the implicit meanings of silence in the classroom, and how sometimes silence is the result of racial or sex-based discrimination.
One such example is “Internalized Oppression,” defined as “assumed racial inferiority on the part of people of color.”
“Let’s think about how students with minoritized identities (e.g., race, gender, sexuality) are silenced by peers and educators,” one slide says.
Silence can be a survival and resistance method, according to the presentation.
A University of Illinois entry sign in Champaign, Illinois. The University of Illinois is a state university in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. It offers teaching and research programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to over 56,000 students. (Don and Melinda Crawford/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“Let’s think about how students, particularly those with minoritized identities use their agency by turning to silence to resist contexts they perceive to be harmful to their identities and sense of community,” one slide said.
The following slides featured anecdotes from people described as high school students. The source of the anecdotes is unclear, and Rodriguez did not respond to a comment request seeking clarification.
One relays the story of someone named Joaquín, billed as a senior in high school, who reported that people ignored him when he gave his opinion, and suggested that his race played a factor in the ignoral.
“Joaquín’s decision is calculated, as he preferred to be quiet, rather than continue to subject himself to being ignored and dismissed,” was the takeaway from Joaquín’s story.
A slide from an October 2025 education course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign attributes a student’s silence to racial animus. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
More slides featured anecdotes about racism.
“During Lissette’s AP English class, she sat at her desk and took notes as she listened to the teacher review the agenda for the day. Students were reading The Great Gatsby and got in small groups to tackle discussion questions. Lissette was in a group with three female students and started the conversation by beginning to suggest how they should go about answering the discussion questions listed on their handout,” one anecdote from a slide called “Group Work Gone Awry” said.
“Lissette did not finish making her suggestion as she was quickly cut off by one of her white peers who suggested to the group that they should read portions of the text out loud first before proceeding to answer the discussion questions. The two white students in the group delegated tasks to Lissette and Marie, a female Asian student in the group. Throughout their group work, Lissette’s white classmates took time to socialize and not include her and Marie.”
“This conversation highlights that even when Latine youth did want to verbally participate and take the lead, as in this small group conversation, white youth often did not let them,” the next slide explains. (“Latine” is a gender-neutral term used in place of “Latino” or “Latina”).
In response to this, the student whistleblower from whom Fox News Digital obtained the lecture slides quipped that they were quiet in school growing up, not because of racism or sexism, but simply because of their personality.
Silence can also be caused by factors like gender.
One anecdote, attributed to a high school senior named Clarissa, claims that a male classmate named Michael receives all the credit for the ideas that were conceived together.
“But it is definitely why there are less women in leadership because – I could only handle it for a few months, and then I was like, ‘I don’t wanna do this anymore,’” Clarissa concludes.
The presentation also covered “microagressions,” defined as “everyday, verbal, nonverbal slights, snubs, or insults regardless of intent that sends a hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their minoritized group membership” — and “stereotype threat,” defined as, “socially premised psychological threat that arises when one is in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one’s group applies.”
An October 2025 lecture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign defines “microaggressions.” (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
“So it’s very much like, ‘these are the ideas you need to have,’ and it’s kind of interesting to me too, because this class was required and this is like one of the first education classes I’m taking,” the education student told Fox News Digital.
“And so far, I haven’t actually learned anything for education about, like, how to set up a classroom, what methods work best with kids for learning — just like basic curriculum that kids are going to be taught, like math and science. There’s nothing of that that I’ve been taught, like this is the first thing.”
The University of Illinois did not return a request for comment.
Click here to view the week 15 slides:
Click here to view the week eight slides:
