‘Please Don’t Deport Our Professor’: Augsburg U. Frets Over One of Its Own

Dozens of Augsburg University students, faculty, and staff members stood outside of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in St. Paul, Minn., on Friday morning with signs bearing messages like, “Please don’t deport our professor,” as they waited for word on Mzenga Wanyama’s future.

ICE officials told Wanyama, an associate professor of English, that he has a month to make “concrete plans to go back,” he told CBS Minnesota.

Wanyama, who teaches postcolonial theory and literatures and African-American literary history, was born in Kenya. He came to the United States in 1992 as a nonimmigrant exchange visitor, but his visa expired in 2005, the Pioneer Press reported.

He later applied for asylum, but was denied, and for years he has had to check in regularly with ICE officials.

This time, a meeting was set to discuss his potential deportation.

The case comes as many college students who were brought to the United States illegally as children are left in limbo by the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era policy that allowed some people who were brought illegally to the United States as children to remain here on a contingent basis. As ICE has been reported to be increasing raids on undocumented communities, a sense of anxiety has pervaded many campuses.

Augsburg’s president, Paul C. Pribbenow, says the campus, which is located in an area with a heavy population of immigrants, is upset over Wanyama’s potential deportation, and has been called to action to provide legal help and personal support.

Pribbenow said he “never imagined that it would be our mild-mannered English professor who would be the one that would attract this kind of attention.”

Support has ranged from letters about Wanyama’s critical role at the university, U.S. lawmakers from Minnesota promising to intervene, legal help from the university’s lawyer, and a petition started by a student in English, Gabriel W. Benson.

Benson, a former student of Wanyama’s and the student representative in the English department, started the petition early Thursday morning after he learned about the professor’s risk for deportation.

In a little over a day, it had received more than 7,500 signatures. He also was among the crowd of supporters who protested in front of the ICE building.

Faculty members like Sarah Combellick-Bidney also helped spread the word. She sent a press release to anyone who would listen. The chair of the English department, Robert J. Cowgill, also spoke up. If not for people like them, Pribbenow said, administrators would not have known Wanyama was potentially facing deportation.

Cowgill said he knew Wanyama had to check in with authorities every six months. It’s “just mind-boggling that he would be in this position,” Cowgill said.

“He’s not the kind of man who would demonstrate for himself. In fact, he is not the type of person that would be comfortable at the center of this storm,” Cowgill said. “He is very modest and unassuming.”

As news spread of the professor’s situation, speculation abounded as to why this happened to him and his family now. “In some ways, the community was both ready for it in general but then specifically called to action by their colleagues,” Pribbenow said.

The issue has been on the university’s radar as officials there have navigated how to best support undocumented students and others with “potential targets on their backs” on the campus for the past year and a half.

“We have done a lot of thinking with our board at the leadership level about what we were willing to do to step in to support them,” Pribbenow said. “We have funds available for students who have legal needs, and we’ve made relationships with attorneys who are willing to step in and provide pro bono support for students who might have had a challenge. But again, we never thought this would happen to one of our faculty.”

Augsburg is a small university, Pribbenow said, and the campus’s response to Wanyama’s situation is an example of the institution’s personal support.

“We can do institutional things, and we are certainly willing to bring our resources to bear,” he said. “But the truth is, the most important work happens in the community we’ve built and the way colleagues surround each other in supporting them.”