From detention to deportation, members of the UCLA community are becoming increasingly vulnerable to anti-immigrant violence amid escalating attacks carried out by the Trump administration. Despite having ample time to prepare, UCLA has failed to provide the resources necessary to educate, support, and protect undocumented students in the face of great uncertainty and anxiety. Students and workers must call upon Chancellor Julio Frenk to take concrete action and defend our community.
An emboldened Donald Trump has returned to the White House. His anti-immigration policies, enabled by bipartisan normalization of externalized and internalized border policing, now reach far beyond geographic boundaries. The continued expansion of deportations under the Biden administration, coupled with its failure to reintroduce safeguards against executive abuse of power, precipitated the current crackdown on immigration. But although the president continues to push the limits of executive authority, Trump’s actions are not unfamiliar to our university. To protect its students, UCLA must proportionally broaden the scope of the protective measures it introduced in Trump’s first term.
UCLA must start by immediately reinstating the Advisory Council on Immigration Policy (ACIP), a board of students, staff and faculty that advised then-Chancellor Gene Block on how to respond to hostile anti-immigrant federal policies during Trump’s first term. ACIP provided a direct link between undocumented students and administrators, allowing community members to explicitly communicate how they were impacted by federal anti-immigrant legislation as well as how UCLA could support them.
In the past year, UCLA’s administration has become increasingly inaccessible, shrouding itself behind bureaucratic structures designed to circumvent and suppress student voices. Currently, Chancellor Frenk is refusing to meet with the Board of Improving Dreams, Equity, Access, and Success (IDEAS) at UCLA, an organization representing and advocating for undocumented and immigrant students on campus. The silence from administrators in the face of escalating attacks on our community is inexcusable, and underscores the need for ACIP’s reinstatement. In the meantime, Frenk’s administration must engage in genuine dialogue with IDEAS at UCLA and other community organizations that were integral in securing resources for undocumented students after the 2016 election.
These measures are vital, but are still stepping stones: UCLA (and the UC as a whole) can and must do more. Although California moved to become a sanctuary state in 2017, the UC can add an additional layer of protection to our community by declaring itself a sanctuary campus. Such a move would prohibit administrators from allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials on campus, cooperating with ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), or sharing immigration statuses with the federal government without a court order. The increasingly uncertain future of DACA, which has already sustained years of executive and judicial attacks, underscores the need for such policies.
Such shifts in federal policy can also be balanced by defiant state legislation. As the state’s third largest employer with close ties to the governor’s office, the UC is uniquely positioned to influence public policy initiatives from Sacramento to Washington, D.C.. To further protect its communities, the UC must urge California to take more expansive steps to protect the undocumented population through its State Governmental Relations office.
Still, it is clear that we cannot rely on advocacy from the UC alone; we must dial up the pressure on our administration, the Regents, and the state.
Our voices are our power. Until our local and state governments step up, we must disrupt their operations — unwaveringly asserting our presence and support. High school students walked out of class across LA this week, gathering from Westwood to City Hall to protest ICE operations and support Día Sin Inmigrantes demonstrators who shut down the 101 Freeway on February 3. If Chancellor Frenk and the UC Regents continue to fail the undocumented community, we must demand their attention by bringing similar strikes to campus.
The need for student action is highlighted not only by our administration’s to protect undocumented students, but also the university’s complicity in border policing. The federal infrastructure that now facilitates mass immigrant detention and deportation emerged from the military/prison-industrial complex (MPIC), where surveillance and xenophobic policing converged around myths of national security and a manufactured “border crisis.” By terminating unjust investments and research, UCLA can weaken these institutions both locally and nationally; this would involve divesting from MPIC firms such as BlackRock, ending research cooperation with the US military and DHS, and abolishing unjust campus policing.
Threats of deportation and immigration enforcement raids have historically been used to surveil and weaken labor and social movements. We must therefore acknowledge that the latest escalation against migrant communities is also a retaliation against the movement for decolonization in Palestine and the past years’ hard-fought wins by labor unions across the country — among other movements and efforts. The border policing apparatus’s ability to destabilize immigrant communities regardless of documentation is often exploited as a form of union-busting and punishment for dissent. In this respect, organized labor is at the frontline of the fight for immigrant justice, and the UC Regents must strengthen campus unions’ capacity for resisting Trump’s agenda by engaging in good-faith bargaining, not illegal strike repression.
Likewise, the already prevalent police surveillance on our campus could be weaponized against students and workers with precarious statuses; UCPD is closely tied to LAPD, whose new Democrat-nominated chief has a long, worrying history of collaboration with ICE. Similarly, UCPD’s use of the campus curfew as a de facto stop-and-frisk policy perpetuates racist trends in policing that disproportionately endanger the undocumented community. UCPD’s worrying practices also include the publication of detailed information about individuals arrested on campus, which not only jeopardizes international students’ visa status, but also facilitates ICE’s inordinate targeting of labor and social organizers.
One of the most concrete actions that UCLA can take today to protect its community is to end the surveillance of its students, abolish UCPD, and bar external police departments like LAPD from campus, embracing community-led safety measures in their absence. If Chancellor Frenk and his administration still fail to resolve these threats and establish safeguards for undocumented students, then their priorities are clear: they will leave our campus vulnerable to Trump’s vicious, xenophobic attacks in order to sustain Block’s brutal crackdown on our constitutional rights.
Still, we recognize that our experiences cannot compare to those of the undocumented community; as IDEAS at UCLA reminds us, “no one understands the undocumented experience like undocumented people.” In order to resist Trump’s deportation agenda, we must follow the lead of undocumented students and community members as they continue a long history of organizing and struggle. We must identify the carceral machinery of US border policing to better resist it. And our voices must be loud and sustained. This is how we protect our community, but also work towards dismantling the institutions that make deportation possible.
We know that UCLA students, faculty, and staff stand with the undocumented community. The remaining question is whether our administration will join us — and we must ensure the answer is yes.
Support IDEAS at UCLA’s demands to meet with Chancellor Frenk here and register for their Community Forum here. For future updates, follow their Instagram @ucla_ideas.
