FIX EXCLUSIVES
ANALYSIS: University officials have not fully embraced shutting federal agents out of campus
University activists have not succeeded in convincing school officials to shield their campuses from immigration law enforcement in the past six months since President Donald Trump came into office. Those that do should face a loss of federal funds, according to a former Department of Justice attorney who spoke to The College Fix.
The president of the University of New Hampshire rejected a call to turn the campus into a sanctuary for college students. A student government resolution at Stanford University failed over fears it would cause further federal scrutiny as well, according to the student newspaper.
While Michigan State University’s student government passed a resolution, it has gone nowhere. The school also faces a loss of state funding if it institutes the policy.
However, some universities, like Texas A&M University have offered “guidance” on how to deal with immigration enforcement. California Community Colleges System said its 116 colleges will assist only when “required by state or federal law.” Elsewhere, university employees have pledged not to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The United Academics Executive Council, a University of Oregon union, said it “will not voluntarily cooperate with federal agents in the arrest, prosecution, or attempted deportation of represented employees or their family members,” in a spring newsletter.
Eduardo Wolf, vice president of the council, told The Fix via phone that this is an attempt “to protect the legal rights of the members.”
The union aims to use their “leadership to push for the adoption of university policies and practices that strengthen workplace protections for the non-citizen employees we represent and their family members,” Wolf told The Fix during a phone interview.
Similarly, the National Association of College and University Attorneys, an organization published a report on how unjust it is for federal law enforcement to pursue illegal immigrants on college campuses.
“Universities already are de facto and de jure sanctuaries, and are sometimes legitimate, persuasive political and policy reasons to pursue policies and programs that underlie the sanctuary campus designation without adopting the title,” NACUA wrote in its report.
NACUA declined The Fix’s request for comment.
A former DOJ attorney who is now an expert at the Heritage Foundation said universities who harbor illegal immigrants should lose federal funding.
“Colleges that provide sanctuary to illegal aliens and that obstruct enforcement of federal immigration laws should be barred from receiving any federal funding of any kind; and should be criminally prosecuted,” Hans von Spakovsky told The Fix via email. “State colleges should have their funding reduced by state legislatures for such misbehavior.”
He also provided his analysis on why there could be resistance to law enforcement on college campuses.
“The majority of universities and colleges are run by far Left administrators, and that includes large numbers of faculty who are ideological foes of immigration enforcement, unpatriotic, and hate the United States,” von Spakovsky told The Fix. “These academics have nothing but contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law and no understanding of that document, which many of them would like to get rid of.”
Activists are wrong to oppose President Donald Trump’s administration, since he is “simply enforcing federal immigration law and the president’s actions are within both his constitutional and statutory authority,” the legal expert said.
Young America’s Foundation previously documented “the rise of sanctuary campuses” in 2016 before Trump even won his first term.
Spokesman Spencer Brown criticized the concept in a recent comment to The College Fix.
He said, “it is tragically unsurprising that leftist administrators are allowing their campuses to be exploited by illegal aliens.”
“In recent semesters we have seen these institutions of supposedly ‘higher learning’ give shelter to Hamas sympathizers, DEI-obsessed racists, creeps, and a laundry list of other miscreants in a misguided bid to earn applause from their radical comrades — all at the expense of student safety and academic rigor.”
MORE: Dept. of Ed. continues to dismantle itself
IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: ICE agents during a meeting; Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Flickr
