Move to halt Trump policy
Bay Area students join national push to have colleges declare ‘sanctuary campuses’
As fear grows over the possible immigration moves by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, a groundswell movement is spreading around the Bay Area and across the country with petitions signed by students, faculty and alumni at colleges and universities to turn the institutions into “sanctuary campuses.”
The worry is that federal immigration enforcement officials could soon swoop onto college campuses to apprehend and deport immigrant students. So activists stretching from Saint Mary’s College, Santa Clara University and Stanford University to East Coast Ivy League schools are answering the threat with a call of their own: Our school administrators must protect our at-risk students by declaring the campuses to be safe places where federal immigration officials aren’t welcome.
Around the United States, campuses have suddenly assumed a key role in the burgeoning movement against Trump’s immigration policies,
“The university is looking at all angles, but in the end as an institution we have always been supportive of undocumented students. A lot of efforts are taking place behind the scenes to assure students feel safe.” — Ray Plaza, Santa Clara University Office for Diversity and Inclusion
even while those policies remain vague. And the defiance is coming at the highest levels.
California State University Chancellor Timothy P. White reaffirmed Wednesday the university’s commitment to fostering a learning community that is “safe and welcoming” for its thousands of students who came to the U.S. illegally.
As the largest public university system in the nation, Cal State’s mission to provide access to higher education and embrace the diversity of its 470,000 students remains unchanged, White said during a board of trustees meeting in Long Beach. Unless forced to by law, he said, Cal State “will not enter into agreements with state or local law enforcement agencies, Homeland Security or any other federal department for the enforcement of federal immigration law.”
Here in the Bay Area, a region already finely attuned to the immigration issues raised to a high profile during the 2016 presidential election, students are demanding that their college administrators do something and do it fast.
Among campuses joining the sanctuary effort is Santa Clara University, a private, Jesuit institution known for teaching values of social justice and inclusion.
The school’s Undocumented Students and Allies Association will host a walkout Thursday afternoon standing in solidarity with undocumented students, who have felt a growing panic following the election. Some have considered not returning to campus for the start of the winter quarter in January, according to Marlene Cerritos-Rivas, co-president of the organization.
“I’ve heard a lot of ‘what’s going to happen to us?’ and ‘what’s going to happen to our families?’ ” she said. “We want this walkout to symbolize the community coming together and protesting (immigration officials) from taking students away from campus.”
The organization has also called on the university to formally name the school a sanctuary campus, which, it says, would bar U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering the campus to potentially apprehend students for deportation.
The association has met with the Office for Diversity and Inclusion and with an attorney to discuss the possibility further, according to Cerritos-Rivas. But in many ways, the school is simply growing the support and protection it has always offered to undocumented students, according to Ray Plaza, director of the Office for Diversity and Inclusion.
“The university is looking at all angles, but in the end as an institution, we have always been supportive of undocumented students,” he said. “A lot of efforts are taking place behind the scenes to assure students feel safe.”
The Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C., said it’s too early for an official sanctuary designation to go into place at any of the schools it represents, but that the topic is being discussed.
At a Stanford march that drew 500 people Tuesday, speakers called for the university to become a sanctuary for “students, staff and their family members who face imminent deportation” under Trump.
In the East Bay, students and faculty at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga weighed in on the subject of Trump and his immigration policies by sending a letter this week to the college president requesting he make Saint Mary’s a sanctuary.
“I think it’s nice to have something that sends a message that we’re a community and we’re together,” student Kyla Cole said.
The Saint Mary’s administration responded to the letter Tuesday night by saying they take the safety of all community members seriously.
According to the online publication Inside Higher Ed, more than 20 such petitions calling on administrators to take action to make their institutions “sanctuary campuses” have circulated through social media since the presidential election.
The president-elect has vowed to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, through which more than 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children have obtained temporary relief from deportation. These immigrants have also received the right to work under DACA.
At a University of California Board of Regents meeting in San Francisco on Wednesday, UC President Janet Napolitano said they’ve created a working group to discuss DACA and other immigration issues that could affect undocumented students in the coming months. Napolitano also plans to meet with undocumented student coordinators.
The campus-sanctuary movement comes in tandem with a similar ongoing effort by cities around the country to create the same sort of safe spaces for immigrants — an effort that actually began under the administration of President Barack Obama, whose own aggressive deportation efforts provoked strong resistance. Trump has promised to up the ante by canceling federal funding for sanctuary cities such as San Francisco that decline to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.