In the wake of Trump’s fire and brimstone immigration policies, which included revoking the protected status of schools and churches, the YDSA at Kansas State acted swiftly to craft protections for our community. Our campus needed a popular and simple campaign to encourage our community of immigrants and the general population to join us in a struggle to protect undocumented students.
These efforts have not come without significant criticism and political roadblocks. Our chapter will not cease to seek protections for migrants on campus, and neither should Kansas State University. In the face of an overwhelming fascist government that has proven it can deport even full citizens with impunity, immigrants in our community need protection now more than ever.
What the YDSA Has Done:
In response to the growing threat, the YDSA started a petition to demonstrate community support in February, which received over 200 signatures within a week. Through hours of tabling and hundreds of conversations with our student and faculty community members, our members were assured that our campus is extremely concerned about protecting immigrants in our student body. Students and faculty alike expressed that the administration was not doing enough to ensure students are aware of their rights and prepared for ICE crackdowns. Within the month, YDSA members had a complete draft of a resolution proposed in Student Government, and hundreds of students who discovered and supported our campaign.
Our chapter decided that passing a Student Government (SGA) resolution was the best way to establish needed protections and encourage administrative change quickly. While SGA has not always been the bastion of progressive change on campus, its close relationship with university administration significantly increases the legitimacy of our demands. More importantly, it was a useful site of agitation that the YDSA had yet to leverage. Working on the resolution encouraged more than 10% of the SGA to contact us directly. Additionally, the debate over the provisions in the resolution has given us important ground to present and argue for necessary changes to Kansas State’s immigration policies.
Addressing the Criticism:
Some made their opposition to our proposal clear. During SGA meetings, conservative opponents situated their responses to our proposal as aligned with our goals, but not our means to achieve them. Every single one cited that “protecting students” is important to them, but they oppose the nature of institutionalizing those protections in some way. Every statement, no matter how long, only addressed 3 points.
The resolution is redundant.
This response is lazy at best and irresponsible at worst. The “Safe Campus Resolution” was crafted from the American Civil Liberties Union template for schools and universities to adopt. The ACLU is a civil rights non-profit that has been at the front lines of protections for speech and citizenship for decades. This means most of the document is based on the advice from experienced professional immigration and civil rights lawyers. Redundancy was either nonexistent or assessed by experts as necessary. For those who read the document in full, they would find that few sections could be called legally redundant and none that would cause any harm to its enforcement or utility.
The resolution will not change anything.
Many conservatives called the process a kind of “virtue signaling”. This criticism ignores the multiple student organizations, hundreds of students and alumni, and immigrant comrades our team consulted before bringing this resolution to a vote. Most importantly, had the resolution been given a veto by one or a few of those organizations, our chapter would have abandoned it at their request. Given the number and proximity of these stakeholders to our project, it makes no sense to call it virtue signaling when it is clear only one side took it upon themselves to ask the community, “What can we do for you?”
The Safe Campus Resolution will increase the negative political spotlight on migrants on our campus.
Admittedly, this was and is one of the most striking and reasonably difficult points to address at the student senate. However, I am no longer so vexed by this critique because the evidence is undeniable: we have no time to wait. This argument was iterated between 3 different speakers at Student Senate and the university administration. They all believe that immigration authorities assume that K-State is a “bad target” for immigration enforcement because ICE either does not know our campus has undocumented students or does not care so much about the ones that are here compared to ones in Illinois or Texas.
As the YDSA predicted, ICE does not care how friendly certain towns are to Trump, immigration enforcement has conducted raids all throughout Southwest Kansas over the last week. It was so sudden that articles report Governor Laura Kelly was surprised by the crackdown. Southwest Kansas is the same voting bloc that largely secures Kansas as a red state in every major election. Kansas State must consider how much longer we are willing to let ICE expand its reach in Kansas before taking a real stand. These towns also probably thought they would be exempt because they were in the Republican majority, allies of the fascist government, not likely targets of the Trump administration. They were wrong. If we fail to implement protections, Kansas State University will be wrong too.
Our campus has undocumented students. Most of them are DACA (Dreamer) students who enrolled under a State of Kansas program to give scholarships for students who are DACA recipients and went to 4 years of Kansas high schools. The program’s goal is to provide these students who had no say in their immigration status the opportunity to build their lives in Kansas. This is what gives conservatives the false idea that our university has such a small population of immigrants on campus that it renders their needs politically irrelevant. Yes, there are few Dreamers, but they are not the only immigrants on campus under threat.
The real risk is to our documented students who hold visas dependent on grants and enrollment through our university or the federal government. Not only has the Trump administration proven day after day that they want to force deportations of political dissidents and even literally random graduate international students, but funding pauses mean that students can lose their visa status for reasons completely out of their control. Most of the international students live in the Jardine Apartments. Many rely on federal research grants that include information about banned words like “climate”. This is such a risky time for them that they are avoiding having conversations about politics, avoiding student groups that may have the DEI label at some point (ie, the very multicultural organizations meant to protect them), and more. They are forced to shut down by fall, self-deport, and constantly fear for when they get notice that their visas are terminated. The International Student Services at K-State runs daily checks on visas in the SEVIS database because multiple universities have seen random immigrant students lose their perfectly legal visas without warning or notification by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Therefore, the threat is not, “Will ICE target K-State?” but when. Eighty other universities that may not have thought they were a real target found out that many visas disappeared for random students over the last few weeks. Fascists will not ignore a chance to marginalize our students just because we avoid political questions. It will not matter to DHS that Kansas is a red state when they rip our students or faculty away from their family, their life.
Our inaction only delays our problems. Our inaction is real, it is political. By making the choice to ignore the Trump administration and avoid key changes needed to protect students, the Kansas State community has chosen to side with Trump. There will not be a card you can carry saying, “I really care about you,” when immigrants on this campus are forced to self-deport or be detained. Without explicit protections, our administration will not be quick enough to protect students if ICE does show up. And, when they do, we will be undertrained, understaffed, and ill-prepared to respond without major changes.
What should progressives do?
Everyone, but particularly non-immigrant comrades, must resist the urge to hide from fascists. If our best response to a regime that will go to extreme and brutal lengths to enforce the rule of white nationalist interest is to hope they won’t find us, we are already lost. This strategy has never stopped a fascist government from enacting mass violence at the misery of everyone in the oppressed class.
ICE already has a database of all the documented and undocumented students on our campus because they are either on scholarship or some international student visa. They will find and target whomever they like. What we can do is make it much harder to indiscriminately harm our community and abuse the law in Trump’s favor.
We can petition changes to Campus Police policies to enforce non-cooperation. They can avoid working with or on behalf of ICE for any purpose allowable by law. We can require mandatory rights training for students and staff. We can work together to form community resources for immigrants on our campus.
What we can’t do is wait for ICE to show up, hope that political pressure will just pass over, invest in the next democrat winning in 4 years, when we have real threats to face right now. We have to work every day to ensure that our immigrant communities feel their community will protect them when ICE comes knocking.
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