Campuses No Longer Off-Limits to ICE

A Temple University student was arrested over the weekend after allegedly impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on campus. The university reported that two people pretended to be ICE agents at a local store on Saturday, wearing shirts that read “ICE” and “police,” while another person recorded them—just days after an ICE raid nearby in North Philadelphia.

Though the incident was a false alarm, the presence of ICE agents on college campuses is a lot less far-fetched now than it would have been several weeks ago. On President Donald Trump’s second day in office, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security rescinded protections for “sensitive areas,” like churches, hospitals, schools and college campuses, where immigration enforcement actions previously couldn’t take place. Under a former version of the policy, issued by the Biden administration in 2021, ICE agents were to avoid operating in these areas “to the fullest extent possible” in order not to “restrain people’s access to essential services.”

That’s not the case anymore.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” acting Department of Homeland Security secretary Benjamine Huffman wrote in a statement. “The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

While the likelihood of ICE raiding campuses remains unclear, the directive marks a significant change for higher ed. The policy shift puts renewed pressure on college leaders to figure out how they’d respond if ICE came knocking on their doors, and how to communicate those plans to faculty, staff, students and community members who may think they’ve gone too far—or, more often, not far enough to protect their noncitizen students and employees. Meanwhile, tensions, fears and false alarms are roiling campuses, exacerbating an already fraught moment for the country’s more than 400,000 undocumented students.

In late January, for example, rumors spread on social media that immigration enforcement actions were happening near the University of Texas at Austin after state troopers were spotted in the area; administrators quickly clarified that officers were there for reasons unrelated to immigration. Even before the ICE impersonations at Temple, the university’s president, John Fry, warned students of an “increase in rumors” being “amplified through social media” and reassured them in a statement that neither campus nor Philadelphia police had received “any reports of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents being on campus.”

Some students are even turning on each other. A conservative student group at Arizona State University, College Republicans United, held an event last week encouraging students to report their undocumented classmates to ICE. About 700 people showed up to protest the event. Meanwhile, some colleges and universities are reporting skyrocketing demand among undocumented students for on-campus legal services.

Though no ICE raids have taken place on campuses during the first few weeks of Trump’s second term, “confusion and misinformation” are running rampant, contributing to an anxious campus climate, said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

“What we would recommend is that every campus should prepare their protocols [and] communication guidelines,” she said—not just to be ready if ICE comes but because doing so “supports a sense of preparedness and can help reduce anxiety on campus. We need to prepare for all circumstances.”

What the Policy Shift Means

Ahilan Arulanantham, professor from practice at the UCLA School of Law and co-director of the university’s immigration law center, said the policy shift is “significant,” but it doesn’t mean ICE agents have free rein on campuses.

ICE officers can enter public areas and ask questions, but students and staff don’t have to answer—a point they might not remember when approached by someone in uniform, Arulanantham said.

“There’s a widespread misunderstanding that … when an ICE officer goes anywhere, they can stop anyone and interrogate them, and people have an obligation to answer their questions,” he added. “One important thing is to educate people about that.”

He also pointed out that ICE can’t enter private areas, like dorms or other nonpublic buildings, without a judicial warrant.

“If there’s a court order to search in a location, then a university administrator would have to open the door and let ICE agents in,” Arulanantham said. But an administrative warrant, more typically used for ICE searches, doesn’t hold the same “legal force.” He recommended campus officials make sure they know the difference between the two documents and clearly define what parts of campus are private, given that there can be “gray areas.”

Arulanantham believes the chances of a campus raid are low because major immigration actions tend to be costly and yield few deportations, especially in places where lawyers are present.

“It doesn’t mean that [the Trump administration] won’t still try to do something like this,” he said. “Obviously, they’re doing many things they’ve not tried in the past,” but he argues it’s “not likely.”

A Range of Responses

Campuses are internally weighing how best to navigate this new, murky terrain so they can protect and reassure students and staff while complying with the law and staving off negative attention from lawmakers.

“It’s a balancing between wanting to demonstrate support [and] commitment, understanding that the situation is creating uncertainty and anxiety, and wanting to be strategic and effective and measured,” Feldblum said.

On some campuses, hypothetical discussions about how to handle ICE have become flashpoints.

At a meeting of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Faculty Council last month, Chancellor Lee Roberts fielded questions from worried faculty members about Trump’s immigration policies, NC Newsline reported. He told the group he empathized with fearful students, but at the same time, “We’re going to follow the law. That’s been our consistent posture.”

The statement set off a firestorm. The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina sent a blistering letter to Roberts, characterizing his comments as “a decision to prioritize voluntary cooperation with ICE over protecting the well-being of students, staff, and faculty.” Roberts responded with a letter clarifying the university’s policies: If ICE agents came to campus, UNC officials would verify their credentials and review their warrants or court orders, among other protections for students’ privacy. The university had a “duty” to stay within the law but would also do “everything we can” to support students affected, he wrote.

Feldblum said that over all, campus leaders are being “more limited, more targeted in how they communicate” publicly about this issue than they were during Trump’s first term. She believes that’s partly because they’ve been burned by federal lawmakers’ scrutiny over their handling of pro-Palestinian protests after some campus presidents got a public tongue-lashing during congressional hearings on antisemitism. While some colleges announced new institutional neutrality policies, internally they’re just as “engaged and concerned” about noncitizen students as they were before, she said, and they “want to utilize tools that they have in the existing law.”

Feldblum added that many campus leaders are publicly emphasizing they’ll “comply with the law,” but at the same time they are perfectly aware that “the law also has protections” that apply to noncitizen students, like the distinction between an administrative warrant and a judicial one.

“All these are tools in our toolbox for responding to any inappropriate actions,” she said.

‘We Would Not Cooperate’

Some institutions have taken a bolder approach to their messaging about protecting noncitizen students.

The Long Beach Community College District designated itself a “safe campus,” assuring undocumented students in an FAQ webpage that campus public safety officers won’t collaborate with immigration enforcement officials.

David K. Thomas, the president of Morehouse College, likewise told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that if ICE showed up on campus, “We would not cooperate.”

“We would not cooperate with that process, or at least I would not authorize my staff to cooperate,” he said, “because I do think that it’s not a moral practice, especially when young people are essentially trying to put themselves in the position to be better and significant contributors to our society, which is what going to college is really about.”

Some students and faculty members are disappointed their campus leaders haven’t come out with such full-throated, public statements.

Hundreds of students and activists at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated in support of undocumented students last week, calling on the university to do more to put them at ease, KQED reported. At Sacramento State University, some faculty members took issue with a campuswide memo that promised a “safe and supportive environment” for undocumented students but also said “faculty should not interfere if ICE personnel come into their classrooms,” according to The Sacramento Bee.

A group of 33 faculty members at Northwestern University issued an open letter, calling on the university to make a public statement committing to support students “regardless of citizenship status, religion, ethnicity or national origin,” guarantee students’ citizenship information is kept private and “refuse to comply with federal authorities regarding deportations and immigration raids.”

Daisy Hernández, an associate professor of creative writing who signed the letter, said, “I feel disappointed. It’s a time of a lot of grief and stress for students and their families.”

Still, she’s hopeful Northwestern’s leaders will come out with some kind of statement. Internally, administrators have been working to address questions and fears about Trump’s immigration policies since before the inauguration, she said. The vice president of student affairs held a meeting last week for faculty and staff members who wanted to better understand resources available for undocumented students on campus.

“I was really surprised at how good it felt to just at least be together on Zoom talking about these issues from the different corners of the work that we do at the university,” she said. “It was really surprising to see what a difference it made just for my own state of mind.”

In a similar act of solidarity, faculty members have been circulating a list of guidelines for what to do if ICE comes and attending immigrant rights workshops on their own.

“I think the big challenge right now is, how public can we be with what resources we do have?” she said. “Regardless of whether you’re a state college, community college, a private, elite college, you are having to grapple with that question about how public to be with the services that you have for undocumented students and students whose family members are undocumented.”