College Leaders and Professors Ramp Up Protest of Trump’s Family-Separation Policy

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Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington, knows that wrenching a child away from his or her family can do serious, long-term damage. She knows that, she says, from her training as a clinical pediatric psychologist.

And that’s why she decided to use her position as the head of the state’s flagship university to condemn the separation of immigrant children from their families, a practice taking place at the U.S.-Mexico border under a policy set by President Trump.

“This cruel and inhumane new standard policy of enforcement at our borders should be swiftly rescinded or legislatively corrected,” she wrote.

She is part of a larger academic movement — most of them faculty members, but a few administrators — that has sprung up to condemn the president’s stance on the issue. (Trump and officials in his administration have variously defended the practice, denied that the policy exists, and blamed the controversy on Democrats.)

The scholars and administrators are members of a national group, including Democratic lawmakers and a smaller number of Republicans, who are disheartened by the president’s actions and have called on him to immediately end the separation of families.

“There’s a different level of ethical and moral responsibility and culpability when you know the consequences,” Cauce told The Chronicle. “We know what this will do.”

Cauce also said, as have many others, that the situation bears some similarity to the United States’ placement of its own citizens of Japanese heritage in internment camps during World War II. She said she wonders if, decades from now, people might question how that happened again.

Cauce took pains not to criticize other college leaders who hadn’t spoken out against the actions at the border. Still, she said, she wouldn’t be opposed to seeing more join the effort.

“Would I love to see higher ed galvanize around this?” she asked. “Absolutely. We influence a lot of people.”

Core Values

For now, however, only a small group of administrators has joined the chorus of critics.

On Tuesday the University of Notre Dame’s president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, condemned the practice in a written statement.

“Central to the Holy Cross education Notre Dame offers is a sense of family, centered on the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and in that spirit I call on the administration to end immediately the cruel practice of separating children from parents and parents from children,” the statement says.

He told The Chronicle that he tries to stay out of the political fray and limits his comments to issues that matter to the university or that cut to the core values of his institution. This case was the latter.

“There are many issues — I wouldn’t comment on every one — but if they go particularly in a stark way, as I think this does, to just a fundamental value of what we try to teach our students and what we try to stand for,” he said, “then I will make a statement.”

Notre Dame was notable this year for hosting Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, as the commencement speaker. The Indiana institution has a longstanding tradition of inviting the sitting president to serve as its commencement speaker, but it chose Pence instead. Jenkins said the university could host Pence and still speak out against the administration’s treatment of immigrant children.

“There’s certainly not a conflict,” he said. “And I would say the vice president speaks frequently of the value of family and upholding the value of families. I would call on him and every politician to follow that rhetoric with action, particularly in this case.”

Janet Napolitano, the University of California system’s president and a former secretary of homeland security, issued a statement on Tuesday that criticized of the immigration system more broadly.

“Congress and the administration must come together to pass legislation that reflects the values of our country, ensures the safety of our borders, and provides a resolution for those brought to the U.S. as children who only know this country as home,” the statement says. “It is imperative that Congress pass, and the president sign into law, legislation that protects our nation’s DACA recipients and provides them a path to citizenship.” (DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is an Obama-era program under which young people who had been brought illegally to the United States as children were temporarily spared deportation. The White House is trying to rescind the program.)

‘Our Duty to Speak Up’

Others in academe have tried to argue the case against the border policy in the court of public opinion. Jennifer Silvers, an assistant professor of developmental neuroscience at the University of California at Los Angeles, co-authored a Washington Post op-ed on the damaging effects of parent-child separation in mid-May.

The piece was well received by her colleagues in higher education, and she said discussions are already underway at her institution to start an interdisciplinary working group on the issue.

The public response, though, was largely negative.

“I’ve been tweeted at and been called un-American,” Silvers said. “It is really just a knee-jerk, automatic response to hearing anything about immigration [that] seems to really get people riled up to a point where it’s difficult to have a conversation. It wasn’t our intention to create something highly political. We just felt compelled, as scientists and mothers, by what we know from the data and from our own personal experiences, which is that parents and their children belong together, period.”

Silvers’s co-author, Jaana Juvonen, a professor of developmental psychology at UCLA and an immigrant from Finland who earned American citizenship a few years ago, said she felt a sense of obligation to write the op-ed.

“It is our duty to speak up,” she said. “If we, as scientists or even as students, are privy to this knowledge and science, if we don’t convey what what is known, who’s in the position then to challenge the new policies? What’s the weight of science?”

Many faculty members have started a letter-writing campaign to document their concerns.

One group, many of them academics, wrote a letter to the secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, decrying the practice of separating children and its damaging health effects. About 1,400 people have signed the letter.

“The broad consensus of the psychological and neuroscientific communities is that the current U.S. government policies on forced separation can only be seen as a form of extreme emotional abuse on the children that are being separated,” they wrote. “This has a real potential for causing long-term, and very possibly permanent, harm. As scientists and clinicians, we implore you to end this inhumane practice and to do everything in your power to develop policies that minimize trauma to these children and families.”

A similar but separate letter started circulating this week, and more than 3,000 academics have signed it.

“The separation of minors from primary caregivers as part of U.S. enforcement of immigration laws is unethical, immoral, and goes against all human-rights conventions and laws,” the letter says. “There is no legal doctrine that requires this, despite the falsehoods being circulated by the Trump administration.”

Omar Valerio-Jiménez, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, added his signature to the letter after seeing it shared by colleagues on Facebook. Valerio-Jiménez was brought to the United States as an immigrant from Mexico when he was 6 years old. Since then, he has done extensive research on borderland history and written a book on the topic.

He said his background helped motivate him to sign the letter. This is an especially “tragic” period in border history, Valerio-Jiménez said, because historically the border has been seen as a symbol of hope.

“These families are coming here to attain asylum, and before their cases are even heard, the Trump administration is separating these families,” he said. “It’s a cruel and inhumane policy. I never thought that I’d live in an age where this would be happening.”

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com. Teghan Simonton and Megan Zahneis are interns at The Chronicle. Dan Bauman contributed to this article.