Florida International U. Profs Claim School Agreeing to Work With ICE Makes Students Feel Unsafe
“we are seeing and personally experiencing an intensifying climate of uncertainty and anxiety on our campus”
I can’t believe people in higher ed are still using this stupid ‘unsafe’ trope. You know who really wasn’t safe on a college campus? Charlie Kirk.
From The Conversation:
We teach at a Florida university that agreed to cooperate with ICE – and we worry that it is making our students feel less safe
Since March 2025, at least 15 Florida public universities and colleges, including the University of Florida and Florida State College at Jacksonville, have signed memorandums of agreement for their campus police departments to collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
These partnerships authorize ICE agents to expand the role of campus police officers so they can receive training and “perform certain functions of an immigration officer.”
The agreements give campus police officers the federal authority to question students who are believed to be immigrants about their legal right to be in the country. Campus police officers can arrest students if the officers have “reason to believe the alien to be arrested is in the United States in violation of law.” Campus police can also check federal immigration databases to see students’ immigration status.
The list of universities in the state that have signed on to these agreements includes leading research universities such as Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University in Miami, or FIU, where we work as professors of education. We are unaware of any school in the Florida state university system that has publicly said they will not sign an agreement.
In the past few decades, the U.S. government has classified universities as “sensitive” spaces that are protected from aggressive immigration enforcement. This means that schools, like churches and hospitals, have until recently been generally considered off-limits for immigration enforcement officers.
In January 2025, President Donald Trump revoked these long-standing Department of Homeland Security protections…
As scholars, we study relationships between schools and democracy, from how students learn languages to how students and educators can become leaders.
As professors, we teach many students who are immigrants or are from foreign countries who come to the U.S. for their studies, as well as many who are children of immigrants.
As a result of these new initiatives, we are seeing and personally experiencing an intensifying climate of uncertainty and anxiety on our campus. These policies are worsening many of our students’ sense of belonging.
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Comments
Why should a student who is a citizen ‘feel unsafe’? Or a student who is lawfully present in the country, perhaps on a valid student visa? The only students who are perhaps justified in their anxiety are those who are not citizens or legally present aliens, i.e., illegal aliens who should not have been admitted to the university in the first place. If the students are that anxious about it, I invite them to return to their native countries and apply for a student visa. If the profs don’t like it, they don’t have to occupy a faculty position at that university.
Hey, Jeff Foxworthy — “If you feel unsafe around ICE agents, maybe you’re a what?”
Oddly, I cannot find any signatures of the “we” who are complaining.
Anyone at FIU who isn’t an illegal alien has nothing to worry about or any reason to feel unsafe. However, if they ARE an illegal alien, they should feel scared, unsafe, and worry. There are 350 million American citizens who worry and feel unsafe about having 10 million illegal aliens, many of whom are known murderers, rapists, and terrorists, running around our country after the Biden administration let them in. The judges and politicians who try to give them citizenship are criminals too.
Laken Riley could have benefited from ICE on campus.
Anyone who feels their “anxiety” is worse than being attacked by an illegal is mentally ill or practicing at-risk behavior due to peer pressure.
Any administration or professor that promotes at-risk behavior in their students and an unsafe campus should be sued and fired.
I don’t care Margaret.