Midwest
Leaked University of Illinois lecture material blames Trump for ‘White supremacy,’ embraces far-left activism
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Leaked PowerPoint lessons from a first-year education course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign show extreme left-wing bias on the topic of illegal immigration, as well as race and gender.
Fox News Digital obtained slides of EDUC 201, an education course for first semester students titled “Identity and Difference in Education,” from a student whistleblower.
The lesson from week 15 was called “Living in Uncertainty: Understanding Immigrant, Migrant, & Refugee Student Populations,” containing 25 slides promoting leftist talking points on immigration. The course is taught by professor Gabriel Rodriguez in the school’s college of education.
The first slide features a photo of a person holding a sign at a demonstration that reads, “No human being is illegal.”
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.
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“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.”
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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.
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The presentation includes a slide titled, “Shifting Support for Immigrant/Refugee Student Populations in Schools,” and compiles headlines about the 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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)
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“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:
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Illinois
Chicago property taxes jump — but unevenly
Some communities saw their bills rise 75% or more.
The median property tax bill for Chicago homeowners rose by a record last year, and some parts of the city saw much steeper increases than others.
The citywide median rise was 16.7%, according to a report from the Cook County Treasurer’s office on bills for tax year 2024.
Many poor communities in Chicago saw the largest increases. In 15 areas on the South and West sides, property taxes shot up 30% because of rising home values. In West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, Englewood, West Pullman and West Englewood, property tax bills rose 75% or more.
Chicago homeowners have suffered in recent years. While property taxes did increase in some Cook County suburbs in 2024, city homeowners felt the bulk of the pain. That’s because assessed values on downtown commercial buildings fell 7.2%, reducing taxes on those properties.
Lower commercial assessments don’t reduce what the city expects to collect in property taxes — it just means homeowners pay a larger share.
Other reasons for Chicago homeowners’ high bills this year included a 6.3% increase in the levy, or what taxing bodies request. That rise was driven by a larger request from Chicago Public Schools and a higher amount earmarked for Tax Increment Financing districts. TIF districts collected 10.4% more year over year in 2024, totaling over $1.3 billion.
For 2024 the total Cook County levy was $19.2 billion, up about 4.8% from the previous year. The Chicago-area inflation rate was closer to 3.5%.
Cook County property taxes have outpaced inflation for a long time. Since 1995, they’ve gone up 181%, from $6.8 billion in 1995 to $19.2 billion in 2024, according to the county treasurer. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 48% increase. If property taxes had risen on pace with inflation, the 2024 levy would have been $13 billion rather than $19.2 billion.
This rising burden can’t continue. Since 2019, more than 1,000 Cook County homeowners — including 125 senior citizens — have lost their homes and all their equity over a property tax debt smaller than the price of a 10-year-old Chevy Impala.
The U.S. Supreme Court has found the practice of taking more than the tax owed to be unconstitutional, but the Illinois General Assembly has yet to change the law to stop it. Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas delayed the property tax lien sale scheduled for last August, but it’s now set for March.
Of the Illinois residents who moved out in 2024, 95% went to lower-tax states. Lawmakers must reduce the property tax burden. They should cap how long TIFs can last and limit how many times they can be extended. Returning that money to general use would bring much-needed transparency and real property tax relief for Illinois residents.
Also, legislators are allowed to work as property tax appeal lawyers, enabling them to profit from ever-growing tax hikes. Imprisoned former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan did that, as did former Chicago Ald. Ed Burke. This practice should not be prohibited.
The best way to reduce the property tax burden is to reform its largest driver: public-sector pensions. In Chicago, 80% of property taxes go toward its growing pension debt. Rather than seeking to control spending, Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently signed a “pension sweetener” for Chicago police and firefighters that will increase liabilities by $11.1 billion.
Reforming the state constitution would allow for moderate pension changes, increasing the fiscal health of those systems and reducing the property tax burden on Chicago homeowners.
Until changes are made, Cook County homeowners will continue to see their property tax bills climb.
Indiana
Heavy rain soaks central Indiana, but drought relief uneven across the state
Central Indiana has seen a very wet start to March, with several rounds of rain and storms moving through the region over the past few days. In fact, the city of Indianapolis has already received more rain in the first four days of the month than it typically gets during the entire month of March.
So far this month, Indianapolis has recorded 3.90 inches of rainfall, which already exceeds the normal March monthly average of 3.79 inches. Much of that rain came during a widespread soaking on Tuesday, when a strong system pushed steady showers and thunderstorms across the state.
Some of the highest totals over the past three days have been recorded across central Indiana. Rain gauges show 5.86 inches in Marion County, 5.02 inches in Morgan County, 4.97 inches in Hancock County, 4.95 inches in Shelby County, 4.57 inches in Johnson County, and 4.26 inches in Hendricks County. These totals represent a significant amount of rainfall in a short period of time and have left many areas with saturated ground and standing water in low spots.
Despite the widespread rainfall, the impact on drought conditions has been somewhat uneven across the state. According to the latest drought monitor, the areas that received the heaviest rain over the past few days are largely the same areas that were already in relatively good shape in terms of moisture levels. Meanwhile, parts of northern Indiana that have been dealing with more persistent dryness have seen much lighter totals.
Cities such as Kokomo, Lafayette, and Muncie have generally picked up less rain compared to areas farther south. Forecast models suggest that pattern may continue over the next several days.
Additional rainfall is expected through Thursday, with another round possible around midday Saturday. Current projections show the best chance for another inch or more of rain focusing once again across the southern half of the state, while northern Indiana may see lower totals.
That means while the recent rain has certainly helped improve soil moisture in many areas, it may not fully address the lingering dryness farther north. For now, the pattern remains active, and Hoosiers should expect more wet weather before the system finally begins to move out later this weekend.
Iowa
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