Sanctuary
In response to the deportation threats of the first Trump administration, students, faculty, and workers pushed universities across the nation to declare their campuses as sanctuaries. Commitments included protecting undocumented students by refusing to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials onto campus, refusing to allow campus police to enforce immigration law, and refusing to share student data with ICE.
Today, the storm has spread: Trump is coming for all of us. His administration is destroying democratic institutions and safeguards in order to consolidate power into the presidency, and he has been targeting the most vulnerable communities: Black and brown people, migrants, queer and trans people, the unhoused, women and pregnant people, Arabs and Muslims, Indigenous nations, environmentalists, earth and land defenders, and more.
As part of this broad assault, people who believe in Palestinian liberation on campus are being singled out with threats of deportation. Zionist groups have been profiling and collecting data on foreign students and faculty for the past several months. Zionist groups have paved the way for this moment, whereby university administrations are now deferring to executive orders from the White House to discriminate, punish, and exclude campus activists who support Palestinians as high-profile targets. The time to fight back is here. We cannot fail those at risk of removal for speaking up against Israel’s US-backed genocide in Palestine.
The NFSJP network of chapters is launching a campaign alongside the newly constituted Sanctuary Campus Network to pool our efforts, strategize about protective initiatives, and care for one another. NFSJP chapters that are already geared to resist the repressive policies and measures of their administrations are well-placed to take action in order to deflect deportation threats or prevent visa rejections. The defense of speech on Palestinian liberation has been a frontline cause for the network. Now we are called to a new level of mobilization.
Palestinians are all too familiar with the experience of unlawful arrest, detention, border policing, removal, and general disregard for their human rights. What Palestinians have experienced for decades is now being imported into the realm of domestic politics in the U.S. as authoritarianism takes hold. The last fifteen months have reminded us that universities are not safe havens, and liberal education is increasingly under direct attack. Our campus organizing is more urgent than ever.
Our Sanctuary campaign is abolitionist and decolonial. It stands against the global carceral archipelago, and the policing of nation-state borders that puts people in cages or strips them of their human rights. It centers Palestinian liberation and voices, and draws on the history of Palestinian resistance to show how alternatives to colonialism and white supremacy are a horizon for all of us. The work can start with your next chapter meeting.
TAKE ACTION TODAY
Monitor and contest university administrations' collection and sharing of data on students and staff involved in anti-genocide protests. University administrations should immediately delete all data used to surveil and discipline students and faculty over pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Amplify this AAUP list of things people need to know, and to ask of their administrations. Use this JVP list too.
Share the Sanctuary Campus Know Your Rights training notes and the Proton drive of resources with your members.
Connect with SJPs and other student groups to build campus coalitions working on this.