College students to protest against Trump deportation plans

“Actions are not necessarily directed at school administration, but about supporting undocumented students on campuses and their fears about what can happen to them and their families under a Donald Trump administration”.

The walk outs took place at more than 100 colleges, including NYU and Columbia in New York City, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Notre Dame, Stanford, USC, Rutgers, the University of MI, and Oberlin College in Ohio.

“This event today is just mobilizing people, but we’re not organized”, said Yale Divinity student Dax Crocker, a volunteer organizer.

The effort, led by advocacy group Movimiento Cosecha, was accompanied at many schools by petitions asking administrators to adopt “sanctuary campus” policies.

They have decried Trump’s often inflammatory campaign rhetoric about illegal immigrants, Muslims and women, as well as allegations, which he denies, that the former reality TV star sexually abused women.

“The University must place the safety of its students first and foremost”.

Whether universities can – or will – adopt some of the larger demands put forth by students, such as refusing to cooperate with federal officials seeking a specific student, is a complex legal matter that remains to be seen, experts say. At many schools, while some students celebrated Trump’s win, others were in tears, anxious about the threat of deportation for themselves or their families.

Locally, students at schools like Columbia, NYU and Rutgers participated.

“I came to this country when I was three-years-old, and not by my choice”, the student said through a megaphone to the throng of protestors.

Reliford said the university needs to take action. There are about 500,000 undocumented people who call the Garden State home.

More than 1,000 signatures have been added to a petition recently circulated around the Stanford campus calling on the school to provide sanctuary.

“I have talked to students because part of my role on campus is to advise student organizations”, Cisneros said.

Renata Mauriz, a junior studying policy and ethnic studies at Brown University, is one of the undocumented immigrants who protested in favor of sanctuary universities on Wednesday.

“We really did stay very non-confrontational”, he said. “This means undocumented, Jewish, Latinx, Muslim, Southeast Asian, Native, Black, disabled and queer/trans communities”.

A Brown faculty letter and published online said, “We have reason to believe that Providence Police officers can not enter the campus without permission of the University”.

Meanwhile, protests were underway elsewhere, such as at the University of Notre Dame, New York University, Amherst College, UW-Madison, Rutgers University and more.

Sponsored by the newly formed Rutgers chapter of Cosecha, the protest and march were organized to raise awareness of the potential issues immigrants and other minority groups may face with the election November 8 of Donald Trump as president.

Trump has promised to deport 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants and to repeal the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which grants temporary relief to hundreds of thousands of undocumented people brought to the U.S.as children. These immigrants have also received the right to work under DACA. The ideology follows that of a sanctuary city.

“We will always be San Francisco”, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee said recently.

Oberlin itself became a sanctuary city in 2009. The city’s budget is $9.6 billion. Further, Trump has threatened to pull federal funding from any city that is a sanctuary city.