University Administrations Must Provide Sanctuary for Students and Academic Workers: Uphold Free Speech, Defend Palestinian Rights, and Protect Vulnerable Migrants
On January 29th, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order targeting university students and academic workers who participate in protests or speech activity critical of Israeli settler colonialism and genocide, falsely conflating these critiques with anti-Semitism and threatening first amendment and academic freedom rights.
The order compels universities to engage in surveillance of non-citizen students, faculty and staff based on vague “security-related inadmissibility grounds,” including any so-called “unlawful activity.”**. The Fact-Sheet explaining the Executive Order singles out those alleged to be “Hamas sympathizers” and “pro-jihad” threatening “we will find you, and we will deport you.” This measure will sow a climate of fear and suspicion on campuses, chilling political speech that is critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinian rights and liberation. It is unsurprising that the Executive Order has been praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a move to “combat antisemitism and support for terrorism on U.S, campuses.”
Coming on the heels of Trump’s announcement that he plans on deporting millions of undocumented migrants, this heightened political attack points in the direction of a quick descent into fascism. As a settler colonial state founded on the theft of land from Indigenous nations and stolen labor of enslaved Africans, fascism is in the DNA of the U.S. We are contending with the history of racist immigration laws and militarization of our borders, in direct connection to a longstanding, U.S. imperialist, political-economic project. Trump’s threat to deport 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is shamefully reminiscent of this.
We also know from history that in times of crisis, vigilante white supremacist violence and racist state repression is enhanced, including under seemingly progressive administrations, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt who issued an Executive Order during World War II authorizing the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to inland internment camps, affecting over 117,000 Japanese Americans, including both first and second generation Japanese Americans.
Trump’s Executive Order is part of a broader effort by the government to suppress Palestine solidarity and other forms of anti-imperialist speech and organizing and to co-opt universities into becoming arms of the surveillance state. It will disproportionately impact Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Black and Brown students, targeting those who speak out against the Israeli settler colonial genocide and U.S. complicity in Israel’s crimes.
The targeting of universities for providing space to students and academic workers to discuss and organize around U.S.-backed Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian national liberation struggle is not a new phenomenon. In 2003, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Select Education launched an investigation into Middle Eastern studies, particularly the work of Edward Said, with concerns about how his influential book, “Orientalism,” and scholarship critical of Israel could have led to the events of 9/11. This effort was fueled by lobbyists who urged Congress to cut funding to universities and programs teaching Said’s work. Such campaigns to suppress critical scholarship have continued, as demonstrated by a series of McCarthyite Congressional House Committee hearings on antisemitism in 2023 and 2024, where witnesses advocated for further restrictions on academic freedom.
As universities across the country face mounting government pressure to suppress dissent, particularly of an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-racist nature, it is more urgent than ever to reaffirm their commitment to sanctuary for all.
Sanctuaries have historically protected marginalized groups, from undocumented students to those threatened by state repression. The Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s emerged as a direct response to U.S. imperialist intervention across Latin America in support of violent, right wing governments and death squads, while denying refuge to those fleeing persecution. Religious communities, recognizing the moral failure of the U.S. government, took it upon themselves to provide protection to asylum seekers from El Salvador and Guatemala. What began as a legal aid effort soon transformed into a widespread network of churches and faith-based groups offering shelter, legal assistance, and underground transportation. Despite government infiltration, arrests, and high-profile trials, the movement persevered, ultimately raising awareness across the country of the impact of the U.S. Cold War, counter-revolutionary interventions across the Americas and forcing legal reforms that recognized the legitimacy of Central American asylum claims.
The U.S. has a long and proud history of sanctuary universities. Oberlin College was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom in the Civil War era. In 2016, students, faculty, and staff at more than 200 colleges and universities petitioned for their campuses to be declared as sanctuaries, demanding that their universities publicly back undocumented students and faculty and not release students’ immigration status to ICE. Using the Fourth Amendment, public universities can also protect the personal records of students, staff and workers. In response to these grassroots campaigns, 28 US universities, including all 23 campuses of the California State University system, vowed to offer sanctuary to their undocumented students.
There was a revival of the campus sanctuary movement with the student led encampments in solidarity with Palestine and against the genocide in 2024. Just as the sanctuary activists of the 1980s challenged US complicity in foreign atrocities, students organizing for Gaza are confronting their universities’ and government’s complicity in imperialist violence. The encampments provided not only physical refuge but also spaces of mutual aid, political education, and collective care. These encampments, like the churches of the Sanctuary Movement, were not merely symbolic—they were sites of direct action against state violence and repression.
The U.S. government has long used deportation as a tool of political repression, targeting radicals and dissidents who challenge the status quo. Under the 1918 Immigration Act, which allowed for the deportation of individuals deemed subversive, figures like anarchist Emma Goldman and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, were expelled from the country. This pattern continued during the early Cold War, when the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover sought to deport several members of the CPUSA (Communist Party, USA) and in particular Black communists like Claudia Jones (originally from Trinidad), as political repression escalated under McCarthyism. The McCarran Act, officially the “Internal Security Act of 1950,” was similarly used to justify the surveillance, detention, and deportation of individuals deemed to be associated with communist or other “subversive” activities.
The U.S. government has a long history of criminalizing political movements that challenge the status quo. From McCarthy-era blacklists and anti-communist witch hunts to Cointelpro repression of Black and Puerto Rican liberation struggles, state repression has often targeted universities as centers of radical thinking and organizing.
Today, Palestine solidarity activists are facing similar political repression across our campuses. Since October 2023, students and faculty have been fired, suspended and arrested for protesting Israel’s genocide. Now, Trump’s executive order intensifies this crackdown, laying the groundwork for mass surveillance, criminalization, and deportation of students and workers for standing on the side of justice under the guise of national security.
Although university administrations have in large part cooperated with the state to violently repress these movements, they still have time to correct courses and join with their students, faculty and staff to defend universities as spaces of learning, care and community. They must implement and/or expand existing sanctuaries to shield students from both anti-migrant and political persecution. Administrations must do this not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because students are the raison d’être for the existence of universities. As University of College Irvine Professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard responded when she was arrested alongside her students at an anti-genocide protest and was asked if she was worried about jeopardizing her job: “What job do I have if the students don’t have a future?”
This political repression is not just an attack on Palestine solidarity—it is an attack on academic freedom, free speech, and the right to protest. Universities must take a stand against this repression and refuse to become complicit in state-driven censorship and policing.
A Call to Action: Universities & Academic Unions Must Declare Sanctuary
In response to these growing threats, we call on universities to declare themselves Sanctuary Universities—committed to protecting students, faculty, and staff from state repression, surveillance, and political retaliation.
Sanctuary campuses must:
- Publicly refuse to cooperate with government efforts to surveil, monitor, deport or otherwise punish students and faculty for teaching about, speaking out or organizing in solidarity with Palestine.
- Defend free speech and academic freedom, ensuring that students and faculty are not penalized for their political beliefs.
- Provide legal and financial support for those facing harassment, deportation threats, or criminalization for their teaching, speech or engagement in protest .
- Keep ICE off of campus as part of the broader movement to demilitarize our campuses (including banning police, military, IOF and other institutions of state violence from campus). This includes refusing ICE access to job fairs or other forms of campus recruitment.
- Academic unions should follow the lead of the Chicago Teachers Union and adopt sanctuary school policy in their collective bargaining agreements and prepare their members to take action to block ICE if they show up to our campuses without a warrant. They can also defend their students and workers by calling on college administrators through statements and resolutions to adopt the above demands and to back up these demands through labor actions (including sick outs, work stoppages and strikes).
- Faculty should pledge to support colleagues politically targeted by Title VI or other forms of administrative investigation for pedagogical decisions regarding teaching about imperialism, settler colonialism, critical approaches to race, gender, US history, et c., which should come under the purview of Academic Freedom protections, by sharing/amplifying the material under question – either by including it on their syllabi or discussing targeted materials in their respective classes. An attack on one is an attack on all! The more they try to silence us the louder we will be!
Trump’s attack on the campus movement in solidarity with Palestinian liberation will not silence the campus movement. Just as the Black and Puerto Rican liberation, anti-racist, economic justice, anti-apartheid, and anti-war protesters resisted repression, we will resist this new McCarthyism.
We urge university administrations to do the right thing and to defend the right to dissent and ensure that campuses remain spaces of resistance, sanctuary, and solidarity.Initial Signatories,
National Lawyers Guild
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Palestine Legal
National Students for Justice in Palestine
U.S. Palestinian Community Network
This Statement has been endorsed by the following organizations.
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective
Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies, San Francisco State University
Black Alliance for Peace
Canada College SJP
City tech SJP
Columbia Law School Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild
CREW (Caucus of Rank & File Education Workers)
CUNY 4 Palestine
CUNY BMCC Students for Justice in Palestine
CUNY FSJP
CUNY Graduate Center for Palestine
CUNY Law National Lawyers Guild Chapter
The December 12th Movement
Downstate SJP
Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at San Diego State University
Freedom Socialist Party, US
Green Party of New Jersey
Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
Jews for Palestinian Right of Return
Labor for Palestine
National Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (NFJP)
New York City Workers for Palestine
NLG- Lewis & Clark Student Chapter
NYU Law Students for Justice in Palestine
Palestinian Assembly for Liberation [PAL]-Awda NY/NJ
Palestine Legal
Palestine Solidarity Coalition – University of New Hampshire
Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)
People’s Response Network (PRN)
Perspective Palestine Foundation
Project South
Radical Lawyers: National Lawyers Guild BU School of Law
Radical Women
Rutgers Faculty for Justice in Palestine
Rutgers Law National Lawyers Guild
San Jose Against War
SEIU Local 73 Members for Palestine
Southwest Virginia Coalition for Palestine
Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH Manoa
SUNY BDS
Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice
The December 12th Movement
The Law Office of Dr Curtis FJ Doebbler
U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
U.S. Palestinian Community Network
UC Law Palestinian Justice Committee
UC Law SF NLG
UMass Amherst Faculty for Justice in Palestine
Union nurses for Palestine – UN4Pal
University of San Diego School of Law NLG
US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
U.S. Peace Council
Virginia Tech 4 Palestine
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