Arizona Faculty Members Want Charges Against Border-Patrol Protesters Dropped

More than 300 faculty members at the University of Arizona have asked university officials to drop criminal charges against two undergraduates who protested an on-campus appearance of armed, uniformed agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

Instead of pursuing “a draconian response” to a peaceful protest, the faculty members wrote, the university should focus on protecting the two students. At least one of the women reported receiving death threats after a video of their protest last month was circulated on right-wing media sites.

The case is being closely watched by free-speech advocates and First Amendment scholars, especially in light of President Trump’s executive order threatening to yank federal research money from colleges that don’t vigorously protect free speech.

Like many such cases, this one involves competing claims from protesters, speakers, and those who were there to hear them, each of whom wants to the university to protect their rights. Arizona is just the latest university whose reaction to such skirmishes is being scrutinized.

On Monday, the campus police charged Mariel Alexandra Bustamante, 22, and Denisse Moreno Melchor, 20, with misdemeanor counts of interfering with the peaceful conduct of an education institution. Melchor was also charged with issuing threats and intimidation. Both students were cited and released.

The two were among the protesters calling the border-patrol agents “murderers” and “an extension of the KKK” through a partially opened classroom door while the agents were discussing careers in criminal law enforcement with members of the Criminal Justice Association, a student club.

In a written statement on Friday, Arizona’s president, Robert C. Robbins, called the incident “a dramatic departure from our expectations of respectful behavior and support for free speech on this campus.”

In the faculty letter to the president, the professors asked that he “end the investigations and harassment of the students” by demanding that the campus police chief drop the charges against them.

“We also implore you to ask the dean of students to support rather than investigate the two students,” said the letter, circulated by a group called Professors of Color, University of Arizona. By Thursday morning, more than 330 people, mostly Arizona faculty members, had signed it, organizers said.

“Rather than its current emphasis on investigating and criminalizing free speech, the UAPD and administration’s highest priority should be an immediate UA response to the death threats and the impact that the Border Patrol on campus has on many of our students, staff, and employees,” the letter stated.

Chris Sigurdson, a university spokesman, said the president did not feel it would be appropriate to drop the charges or ask that they be dropped.

The students involved in the protest aren’t the only ones feeling endangered, the faculty members wrote. On Tuesday, a threatening social-media post prompted students and faculty and staff members to evacuate the César E. Chávez Building, which houses the Mexican American Studies department and the Adalberto and Ana Guerrero Student Center.

The Arizona Republic received a screenshot of the post, which said that “radicals” at the University of Arizona were teaching students how to become activists. “Believe it or not, there is an Army of so-called social justice warriors itching for a fight,” the post reportedly said. “But they will certainly run and cower like children when the shooting starts in their direction. And it will happen … only question is WHEN?”

Sigurdson said that law-enforcement officials who examined the threat had no reason to believe the person who posted it was capable of carrying it out, and that officials had determined that it was safe to return to the building.

On Wednesday, President Robbins issued a letter calling the safety of everyone on campus his top priority. Students and employees on both sides of the issue have been the targets of “hateful emails, social media posts and, most concerning, threats from external organizations and people who are not part of the university,” he wrote.

The campus police were consulting with other law-enforcement officials, including the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to evaluate the threats, he wrote. He urged anyone who felt unsafe to report questionable messages or activities to the campus police.

“The events of the past week have challenged our commitment to safety as well as interpretation of our First Amendment rights,” the president wrote. “It is clear to me that we all have much to learn from each other in order to properly interpret our rights and, importantly, to consider how overall safety on campus may be affected. These are important discussions, and this community could serve as a model for how we all move forward during these challenging times.”

On Tuesday, one of the key signers of the faculty letter, Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education, expressed outrage on Twitter over threats by the “right wing echo chamber” and the administration’s conclusion that “the protesters are the problem.”

Cabrera is the author of White Guys on Campus, a book published last year, based on conversations that he says reveal how often unconscious acts of racism can cause racist views to spread.

In an interview on Thursday, Cabrera said having armed, uniformed border-patrol agents on campus creates a hostile atmosphere for undocumented students and faculty and staff members. Arresting the students for disrupting the activity of the group that invited the agents, he said, “is prioritizing a minor amount of discomfort to a student group over the real threats to safety” for undocumented students and employees.

Faculty members in the department of Mexican American studies have also written to the university’s president asking him to drop the charges against the two students.

Correction (04/04/2019, 5:00 p.m.): This article originally quoted a university spokesman as saying that the president lacked the authority to drop the charges against the two students. He later said he had meant to say that the president didn’t feel it would be appropriate to do so. The article has been updated accordingly.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.