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The City University of New York, which enrolls more than 16,000 students who aren’t citizens, is readying the community for potential immigration enforcement as President Donald Trump returns to the White House.
Staffers with the university’s Undocumented and Immigrant Student Programs initiative and its Citizenship Now! legal assistance program held a two-hour zoom session on Thursday evening to guide more than 500 participants through a gauntlet of information.
That included how student data is federally protected, how the CUNY community can be protected from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the border policies that Trump might enact in his coming term.
Nermeen Arastu, co-director of the Immigration & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic at the CUNY School of Law, said the session was meant to help participants know what to watch for in the coming years and start thinking through how to “fight back against some of these destructive policies.”
CUNY School of Law immigrant and noncitizen rights clinic directors Talia Peleg, left, and Nermeen Arastu speak on a Zoom about how the university will deal with a planned immigration crackdown by the incoming Trump administration, Jan. 16, 2025. Credit: Screengrab via Zoom
The question, Arastu continued, is “How are we, together, going to protect our communities, particularly in the CUNY system, our clients, our students?”
During his first term, Trump blocked citizens from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S., and reportedly considering expanding that ban to more countries in his coming term. He has also promised “mass deportations,” while describing undocumented immigrants as a threat to public safety.
“There’s going to be a call for bravery and courage, also on the part of our institutions, to stand up and defend our communities, which we think will be even more difficult this time around,” Arastu said.
That call may be complicated by Mayor Eric Adams, who flew to Mar-a-Lago to visit with the incoming president on Friday and has called for changes to New York’s sanctuary city laws while repeatedly expressing his interest in cooperating with the new administration on immigration enforcement.
Campus Protections
CUNY has often promoted the support it offers undocumented students, and the webinar wasn’t the first step the university has taken to prepare them for a Trump presidency. In November, it advised international students to return to the U.S. before his Jan. 20 inauguration. Following the election, it posted guidance online about preparing for potential immigration policy changes and emergency planning for parents.
The guidance urges undocumented immigrants to make plans in case family members are arrested and detained. It encourages all immigrants to consult with qualified immigration law experts and ensure IDs, work permits, and tax records are easily accessible and updated.
Some 30% of CUNY’s roughly quarter-million students are foreign born, including about 4,000 who are undocumented, according to the university.
Participants on Thursday’s webinar posted more than 100 questions in the virtual chat, including about legal protections for electronic devices, deportation risks for those who have declared asylum, and ICE’s presence in New York City.
CUNY doesn’t and won’t share student records without a warrant, subpoena, or court order, and doesn’t track or document students’ immigration statuses, according to immigrant student FAQs on its website.
Since 2011, and continuing through the first Trump administration, ICE has considered colleges and universities to be “sensitive locations,” where immigration enforcement actions generally don’t occur outside of “extraordinary circumstances,” as the FAQ notes. Trump is reportedly planning to drop these protections.
CUNY immigrant student services director Cynthia Carvaja speaks on a Zoom about how the university will deal with a planned immigration crackdown by the incoming Trump administration, Jan. 16, 2025. Credit: Screengrab via Zoom
Cynthia Carvajal, the director of Undocumented and Immigrant Student Programs, said at the beginning of the webinar that the university offices “will be providing as much information as we currently have available — resources, guidance.”
She went on: “But, as you know, there’s still a lot that we don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen.”
‘A Lot of Fear’
Janet Calvo, a professor specializing in immigration at CUNY School of Law, cautioned that it’s hard to say before Trump returns to power how his rhetoric will translate into policy. “There are a lot of things out there, a lot of negative things, that are being thrown out,” she said. “We don’t know which ones are going to come to fruition and not come to fruition.”
During the last Trump administration, she said, immigrants “were afraid to go to school. They were afraid to go to a hospital, or afraid to get health care. They were afraid to travel. They were afraid to go to work, even for those people who were in immigration statuses where they had clear permission.”
Alyshia Gálvez, an anthropologist and professor of Latin American studies at Lehman College, says that she’s sensed “a lot of fear” among students who aren’t willing to discuss sensitive immigration matters.
“A lot of students are not willing to talk about it,” she said. “They don’t know who they can talk to about their status. They think they’re the only one. They don’t know that there are policies to protect them. They’re afraid of being discovered.”
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