Featured Article: "Universities Push Sanctuary Campus Agenda for Illegal Immigrants"

Protesting goes hand in hand with education, or so think the entrenched leaders of current K-12 and higher education institutions. The current campus crusade is that of anti-immigration enforcement, which is causing issues for institutions. 
 

Tensions have been high since the start of the Trump administration’s mandate for federal law enforcement officers, or Immigration and Customs and Border Protection (ICE), to begin deportations of illegal immigrants. The deaths of two protesters at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota and the subsequent uptick in anti-ICE protests, as well as debates centered around illegal immigrant rights versus migrant status, First Amendment rights of citizens, and other political battles, have only escalated the situation.   
 

Within the education sphere, we are starting to see a rise in anti-ICE activism.
 

Over the past month, school-age students organized anti-ICE walkouts. On January 30, thousands of middle and high school students walked out of school at the urging of immigration advocates, with more walkouts happening since. Questions about whether schools facilitated these walkouts are being investigated in Texas, including whether public funds were spent and whether any laws were violated. It is likely that other schools will face similar scrutiny by lawmakers in the coming days.  
 

However, K-12 schools are not alone. 
 

Columbia University is back at the helm of the protest ship with news breaking over the weekend that a dozen students and faculty were arrested at an anti-ICE protest. Inside Higher Ed explains, 
 

The protest, organized in part by a group of Columbia faculty and staff called CU Stands Up and the Columbia chapter of the climate activism organization the Sunrise Movement, drew about 150 people, many wearing shirts that read ‘Sanctuary Campus Now’ and ‘ICE Off Campus.’ The 12 were reportedly arrested after they blocked traffic on Broadway, just outside campus, and refused to heed police warnings to move.  

Since last April, some institutions have been attempting to protect students from deportation without risking funding cuts from the Trump administration. Last year’s ICE crackdown on international students as well as illegal migrants was fueled by rooting out pro-Hamas sympathizers on campuses (Hamas is recognized by the U.S. Department of State as a foreign terrorist organization). The more recent illegal immigration crackdown by the Trump administration has created a stir among students and faculty for colleges and universities to declare “sanctuary campus” status.
 

For historical context, in 2016, during Trump’s first term, college students staged walkouts and demonstrations in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to declare themselves a “sanctuary campus” in the wake of the Trump administration’s plan for deportations of illegal immigrants. The phenomenon has now begun anew. Sanctuary campuses promise to shield students from federal authorities, adopting policies that protect immigrants with no legal status in the process. With roughly 408,000 illegal immigrants—as of 2023—attending American colleges and universities, the issue is widespread. Writing for Minding the Campus, Jared Gould and Peter Wood document how political parties and universities have transformed illegal immigration into a moral crusade—teaching students that law, authority, and citizenship are negotiable when they conflict with progressive ideology. Sanctuary campuses, 
 

[T]each students that colleges and universities may defy the law with impunity while displacing American citizens who might otherwise have been admitted. They allow lawbreakers to further entrench themselves in a country whose laws they have already violated. More than that, sanctuary campuses ratify a familiar leftist conceit in which nations are treated as artificial constructions founded on force and privilege, and justice is said to require a globalized order that dismisses the laws, cultures, institutions, and traditions of the host country as illegitimate. Students shaped by this view come to regard immigration enforcement as immoral and defiance as virtuous. 

Calls for sanctuary campus status place administrators and leadership between a rock and a hard place, especially after schools adopted institutional neutrality policies in the wake of Black Lives Matter “statement culture” and later the pro-Hamas protests and a rise inanti-Semitic incidents during the 2023-24 school year. It remains to be seen how colleges and universities will handle the increasing pressure from students and faculty to protect illegal immigrant students from deportation by declaring “sanctuary,” and whether the newly rediscovered principle of institutional neutrality will stand this test. 
 

The unfolding situation within academia and how authority figures handle growing dissent among students and educators could be a step toward course correcting, or could further entrench academia’s activism pipeline, rather than producing well-educated, virtuous citizens. The coming days will be telling.
 

Until next week.

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