UC President Napolitano blasts idea of ending DACA
University of California President Janet Napolitano blasted the idea of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on Thursday afternoon.
The program, also known as DACA, which Napolitano helped enact in 2012 as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under former President Barack Obama, gives some undocumented young people temporary relief from deportation. But President Donald Trump has repeatedly signaled that he might end the program.
“Throwing them all into a life of uncertainty is just wrong,” she said during a question-and-answer session after delivering a keynote address at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in San Francisco.
The program, which around 800,000 young people have taken advantage of so far, she said, “has run exactly as we’d hoped.”
But in recent months, some attorneys general have urged Trump to halt DACA, a prospect that has alarmed immigrant activists.
Napolitano pushed back at the idea of tying the program’s future to funding for a border wall, saying it’s not right to use young people as “bait.” She called on Congress to pass a standalone Dream Act, to give undocumented young people more permanent relief from deportation but acknowledged the idea is currently politically untenable. “I wouldn’t bet the farm on that,” she said.
During a keynote address, Napolitano also addressed ongoing free speech debates that have rocked UC Berkeley and other schools, including her alma mater, the University of Virginia, in recent months.
“The question most on my mind these days is a complex one rooted in this country’s political and ideological polarization: How can we safeguard both truth and freedom of expression when confronted with provocations that endanger our campuses and communities?” she said. “Given troubling and tragic incidents that unfolded this past year at Berkeley, Middlebury College and Charlottesville, on the University of Virginia campus, it’s a question that’s unavoidable — and not easily answered.”
In response to a question afterward about whether conservative provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, whose February speech at Cal was canceled after his supporters and protesters clashed violently, should be allowed to speak on campuses, she said, “As abhorrent as some of their views are and some of their speech is, the value is not to censor it before it actually occurs.”
Berkeley mayor Jesse Arreguin this week called on the school to cancel a campus speech by Yiannopoulos planned for September. Cal has said the talk will take place and Napolitano said her office is working with the campus to make sure appropriate security is in place.
“Prejudging speech before it occurs,” she said, “that is not something that we are prepared to do.”
As the nation, and its students, grapple with such issues, she called on academic leaders to “do more to counteract misinformation and outright bigotry.” She urged people not to fall prey to what she dubbed the “myth of the many sides,” or the idea that all sides of an argument carry equal value.
“Here is where the myth of many sides comes into play,” she said. “It’s a falsehood to equate white supremacists or neo-Nazis with those who oppose their ideologies.”
“Those of us in the academic community share a responsibility to guard against falsehoods and false equivalencies,” she said. “The ideologies of white nationalists and neo-Nazis do not represent the truth by any measure. There is no place in American democracy for white supremacy. Period. But because there will always be a place in America for freedom of expression, even when it’s hateful, we must counter the hate and falsehoods by shining a light on the facts.”