Northeastern University is under pressure because of a $7.8-million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, which has drawn criticism over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The university’s relationship with ICE was described in a Money magazine article about organizations that are doing business with the controversial agency. A petition that was signed by students and alumni urged the university to break all contracts with ICE.
But Northeastern officials say the research funded by ICE has nothing to do with the agency’s aggressive policing of immigrants. The university’s contract is for “exploratory methods mapping process services for big data sets.” Tim Leshan, Northeastern’s vice president for government relations, said the contract was funding research that uses data “to try to help better understand and prevent illegal export of weapons of mass destruction.”
“It has nothing to do with the border issues,” he said.
The professor conducting research with the funds, Glenn Pierce, principal research scientist at the Institute of Security and Public Policy, said the contract was likely to end in September anyway — two years into what was going to be a five-year project. He said he was not given a reason for the contract’s end.
Pierce explained that in his research he analyzes data on “dual-use technologies” that are exported from the United States. The technologies are products that could be used for something as innocuous as a refrigerator but also in the construction of weapons. He looks for cases in which such technology is sent to countries or companies that the United States government finds questionable in some way.
Pierce said that “99.99 percent of the time that’s going to be fine. But if you export it to somebody that shouldn’t be getting it,” the customs agency “can go talk to you.”
Sometimes the companies doing the exporting don’t know where the technology ends up, Pierce said. In that case, ICE officials might talk to the exporters in order to educate them.
He said ICE is his client because it is the agency that is responsible for collecting data on goods that are exported from the United States.
Leshan said Northeastern had taken a strong stance against the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The university joined amicus briefs challenging both the administration’s travel ban, which barred visitors from certain majority-Muslim and other countries, and the effort to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era policy that protects from deportation young people who were brought into the country without documentation.
“We’ve been very clear about our view on those issues,” Leshan said. “At the same time, we’re a research university that’s trying to work on important issues that will benefit people in the United States and the whole world.”
He said that accepting funding from ICE does not amount to an endorsement of the agency or the Trump administration’s policies.
But activists say that it does.
A petition circulated by the Boston-based activist Evan Greer had 500 signatures by Tuesday afternoon. More than 250 of the signatories were Northeastern students, 100 were alumni, and more than 10 were faculty and staff members, according to Greer.
“Having any kind of contract with ICE at this moment in history is irresponsible and immoral,” the petition says.
Calls to abolish ICE, which was created in 2003, have grown louder in the past few weeks because of the agency’s role in separating more than 2,000 migrant children from their parents when they crossed the United States’ border with Mexico. Images of children held in chain-link fence enclosures and an audio recording released by ProPublica of children crying for their parents have galvanized people to oppose the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.
