Student Activists Are Pushing Back Against Immigration Policy. For Some, It’s Personal.

Cristian J. Padillo Romero supports the protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) erupting on college campuses. For this Yale University graduate student in history, the demonstrations hit close to home.

His mother, Tania Romero, has spent months in an ICE detention center. An undocumented immigrant recovering from Stage 4 cancer, she has been held in a large, open room with about 100 other people at the Irwin County Detention Center, in rural Georgia, where the lights are almost always on and she has been denied access to her doctor, he said. Fearing that she could be deported back to Honduras any day now, he has called on his Yale classmates and fellow alumni of Pomona College to help.

On October 29, Padilla Romero created an online petition urging ICE to release his mother. By November 4, it had gained nearly 30,000 signatures and raised more than $35,000 to cover her medical, dental, and legal expenses.

“My mom is a very strong woman and a very spiritual woman, but that can only go so far in terms of your physical health,” he said.

Protests like his are part of a growing movement among students to push back against the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Students have rallied in recent years against sexual assault, police brutality, and far-right campus speakers. But the new protests against ICE represent a shift. The demonstrations are against a federal agency that many colleges do business with. Its representatives are invited to campuses to speak and to recruit students for jobs.

In some ways, the protests are reminiscent of those decades ago against CIA recruiters. What’s different is that today’s students are more likely to be personally affected by the government’s immigration policies.

College leaders have worked to support their vulnerable international and immigrant students by, for example, declaring their campuses to be sanctuaries and supporting the continuation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), which protects people brought to the United States as children from deportation. But administrators have also condemned many of the protesters’ tactics, saying they thwart free speech or raise other problems the protesters haven’t considered.

Shouting Down Speakers

The protests take many forms: calling for aid to individuals whose lives have been turned upside down, protesting ICE recruiters on campuses, shouting down speakers, and demanding that colleges end any and all business ties with ICE.

Students have not limited their campaigns to colleges: More than 1,000 students at 17 colleges have pledged not to work at the software company Palantir because it does business with ICE. In September students at the University of California at Berkeley protested the presence of Amazon at a career fair, because the company holds contracts with ICE.

For many students, the way to fight ICE is to persuade their colleges to stop doing business with it. Students at several colleges, including Northeastern University, the University of Maryland at College Park, and the Johns Hopkins University, have demanded that their institutions sever contracts with the agency.

Drew Daniel, an associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins, helped start the campaign there by circulating a petition against the university’s longstanding contracts with ICE, which have earned it more than $7 million. After the petition gained nearly 2,000 signatures from students, alumni, and faculty and staff members, activists escalated their tactics by holding protests. In April a monthlong sit-in took place in the university’s administrative building. That resulted in the arrests of seven protesters.

Johns Hopkins recently decided to not renew its contracts with ICE, which provided emergency-medical training and leadership education by the medical school. The protests were not a factor in its decision, the university said in a statement. Rather, it cited the need to reallocate “substantial” resources to manage the program and “complications related to the contracting process, including some delays in notifications by the agency regarding its intentions.”

Johns Hopkins also emphasized its opposition to the protesters’ position, saying that were the administration to insist that faculty members withhold instruction or medical care to disapprove of a federal policy, it would be “antithetical to the mission of the university.”

“While Johns Hopkins’s leaders have been unequivocal in expressing concern about the impact of recent immigration policies on members of the university community and those for whom we provide care, the university’s commitment to academic freedom requires deference to faculty decisions made in relation to their research, teaching, and clinical work,” the statement said.

Daniel, however, said he considered the activism a success. “I think in general, universities know the buzzwords of tolerance, inclusion, and diversity. But I think there’s a very strong feeling across the board from undergraduates that it was deeply inconsistent that you wanted an inclusive and diverse campus while partnering with ICE, because of the racism in the way ICE targets black and brown people.”

Recent demonstrations that attempt to prevent ICE officials from speaking on campuses have also been controversial.

Last month, nearly a dozen activists at Georgetown University shouted down Kevin McAleenan, then acting secretary of homeland security, who was to give the keynote speech at an event held by a nonpartisan think tank, the Migration Policy Institute, at the university’s law school.

Recently, a former director of ICE, Thomas Homan, was also shouted off the stage by protesters at the University of Pennsylvania while on a panel discussing immigration policies. Students chanted, “No hate. No fear. Immigrants are welcome here” and “Go home, Homan,” The Daily Pennsylvanian reported. The university said in a statement that the panelists eventually did hold their discussion, before a smaller crowd.

A petition signed by hundreds of students and alumni of Penn, among other people, argued that by inviting Homan as a guest speaker, the university was supporting a “violent organization responsible for terrorizing immigrant communities” and violating human rights.

In a similar case at Harvard University, a petition called on the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, to stop seeking comment from ICE when covering student protests, saying that doing so endangered undocumented students who participated in the demonstrations. A reporter at the newspaper covering a rally that called for the abolition of ICE had sought comment from the federal agency following the event.

The Crimson stood by its practice of seeking comment, pointing out that doing so is a tenet of journalistic ethics.

In April two students at the University of Arizona were arrested after they disrupted a classroom presentation on criminal-justice careers by Border Patrol agents. The agents had attended a career fair at the university that day.

First Amendment Debates

Many college administrators say the demonstrations can work against democratic principles.

Penn, in a statement, said the students’ actions against Homan had been “wrong and profoundly disappointing” because they had attempted to “stifle speech” and had run counter to Penn’s ideals of free and open expression. Conversations surrounding “important and sometimes controversial subjects of our day” are part of the higher-education experience, the statement said.

It’s important for colleges to allow students to exercise their First Amendment right to speak out, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University’s School of Law. But that principle, he argued, also applies to speakers and the people who want to hear them.

“Your own expression of dissent is critical, but the right of others to hear speakers is equally important,” said Chishti. “You cannot have this principle only one way. This principle needs to go both ways, and sometimes the activists miss that point.”

Shouting down speakers could, in fact, backfire on protesters, said Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education who has written a book about free speech on campus.

The speakers, after all, are already in power, she said. “You can struggle against this in a way that would create a broader coalition rather than gaining this temporary victory or what feels like a victory over a speaker. That doesn’t change the fact that your family or yourself or your peers can still be in danger because of these policies. You didn’t make a dent in this.”

Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said it’s important for college administrators to understand the effect of harsh immigration policies on their students and to help them to feel safe. The alliance, which includes about 450 college leaders, recently coordinated the filing of an amicus brief in support of DACA, in a case that is scheduled to be heard next Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But that support must be balanced with upholding principles that support free speech, diversity of opinion, and academic research, she said.

Cristian Padilla Romero remains convinced that campus activism is “fundamentally important” and hopes it will save his mother, who was arrested by ICE after having been pulled over for a traffic violation.

After a motion to reopen her case was denied by an immigration judge, her family fears that her deportation back to Honduras, a country she hasn’t lived in for more than 20 years, is imminent. There she will not have access to the medical care she needs, her son said.

The chance that his mother would be deported is “something we always know in the back of our heads,” he said. “But it doesn’t hit you until it actually happens to you.”

Danielle McLean writes about federal education policy, among other subjects. Follow her on Twitter @DanielleBMcLean, or email her at dmclean@chronicle.com.