Protecting students from ICE
What can we do when everybody comes back in the Fall?
I think it’s our institutional duty to protect our students. If we don’t take proactive steps to improve the safety of students and work to protect them from kidnapping by federal goons, then we’re not doing our jobs.
An incident that happened this morning make me realize that we all need to step up in ways that we haven’t before. Unmarked vehicles showed up in one of the campus parking lots, and it turned out to be ICE who were trying to use the university as a staging ground. They were asked to leave, and they did.
Campus is relatively quiet because of summer, but this is a reminder that it’s quite foreseeable that they’ll march into campus with their combat gear and huge guns and kidnap people away from our community. It’s been happening all over the country, with a particular focus on Los Angeles at the moment, so what’s stopping them?
What can we do?
No, seriously, I’m asking you: What can we do? Ideas of all kinds are welcome, and if there are measures being taking on your campus that you think others should adopt, please share.
Our campus already has asked us to notify the Campus Police if we see any ICE activity on campus. I’m assuming that’s what happened today. I’m not sure that’s really going to protect our students, though, because are our campus police going to chase them off campus when they’re out with their guns and face masks and in full commando mode?
What else? I’ve only got a couple ideas:
I think it’s useful to encourage members of the campus community to install the ICE Block app and keep it active while they are on campus and in the community. That way, they can be notified if anybody reports the kidnappers on or near campus, and also it will help them to promptly report it.
I don’t think this app will be enough to get the word out to everybody as quickly as we will need, but it’s not nothing.
Here’s another idea that I think campuses can adopt. I imagine that every single one of our campsues in the United States has an emergency notification system developed for when a dangerous person is seen on campus brandishing a gun. On our campus, everybody gets an emergency text to let them know (that they should run, hide, or fight when there is an active shooter). What if that threatening person on campus is a goon from ICE? Wouldn’t it make 100% sense to leverage that active warning system to protect students from being kidnapped?
I’ve been thinking about all of the possibile reasons that a person can come up with that would prevent an active shooter emergency notification system to be leveraged as a gestapo notification system. There are only a couple barriers, which I think are surmountable. One is that some folks might argue that these emergency response systems might have been funded by certain sources or agencies and that if we use it in a different way to prevent crimes committed by federal agents, then there could be some kind of trouble or negative consequences. Considering the depth of depravity we are seeing in our government, they don’t need to find any excuse like that to punish universities, so I don’t see this as a substantial issue. The other one is that this notification system may well be tightly coupled with local law enforcement agencies, and it might not be that simple to change the content of the message to reflect a federal agent with guns instead of a disgruntled student with guns. Calling the local cops out can make the situation with the goons worse. Even though the local cops aren’t going to kidnap anybody, they have created circumstances (intentionally or otherwise) that make it easier for the goons to take people away. I think this might be a possible technical constraint in the system. Though I think an immediate campuswide alert, even if it calls in the local cops, is better than not issuing one at all.
So we just need the infrastructure and policy to implement a campuswide alert once the presence of federal goons on campus is verified. Our campus already has a policy about what the university police and administration will do in the event of a good raid, so this is just about communicating that information to all member of the campus rapidly.
There’s also the possibility that the various unions on campus, many of which have phone numbers of members, could set up such an alert system as well, which would reach faculty and staff, but not administrators or students. But that’s not nothing either.
I don’t think I happened to mention to y’all that, as of a couple months ago, I was elected to serve as the Chair of my university’s Academic Senate. Which means that attending to this issue isn’t just a good idea, but it’s also my responsibility. I think it would make sense for you to contact folks up the chain to see what you can do. We’re going back to campus in like 6 weeks! That’s not a lot of time.
Any additional thoughts or considerations out there, angles that I’m missing?
I’m chair of our faculty union delegates assembly, and have been involved with conversations around what to do if ICE shows up for several months. We requested, and received, instructions from the university general counsel that was helpful but remains incomplete. In particular and related to the scenario you describe is that while we can block agents from entering our private space (which includes classroom) we lack clarity on where the boundaries are between private and public. Rooms vs hallways? Inside versus outside? What about courses with outdoor components? Sand then there are the (unionized) staff from all across the globe.
We have asked for details on the public v private space, but I really like the idea of using our alert system. We already get alerts not only for threats on campus but also for dangerous situations in town.
Kidnappings should qualify!
Thank you for starting this conversation. I like the idea of using an alert system especially given the fact these systems SHOULD be used when people are being kidnapped in a dangerous manner into unmarked vehicles by unidentified people. Another idea I have is that we should offer more online options so that students who need to can still learn and pursue their studies from safer locations. We did it to protect from a deadly virus. We can do it to protect people, who are often minors, from being kidnapped and tortured. We shouldn’t have to be having this conversation yet here we are.