FILE - the University of Oregon's business school on Dec. 1, 2019. Students are calling on UO to protect international students amid a wave of federal immigration action on college campuses across the country.
Kaylee Domzalski / OPB
Students at the University of Oregon are calling for university administrators to take more action to protect international students amid an immigration crackdown on college campuses across the country. At least four international students at UO have had their visas revoked, along with 13 at Oregon State University and two at Portland State. At a rally on UO’s campus last week, students demanded that the university not comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, notify students of ICE activity on campus and allow students whose visas have been revoked to remain enrolled, among other things.
Jess Fisher is a steering committee member for the UO Young Democratic Socialists of America, which organized the rally. She joins us with more details on student demands and how ICE actions are changing the mood on campus.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Thirteen international students at Oregon State University have had their visas revoked in recent weeks. At least four international students at the University of Oregon are in the same situation, along with two at Portland State. Now, some students at the U of O are trying to push back. At a rally on the campus last week, activists demanded that the university protect its student body. They called for the university to not share student information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to notify the community about ICE activity on campus, and more broadly to stand up to attacks on academic freedom. Jess Fisher is a steering committee member for the UO Young Democratic Socialists of America, which organized the rally. She joins us now. Jess Fisher, welcome to the show.
Jess Fisher: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Miller: Very few details have emerged publicly about what’s been happening to the international students at the University of Oregon. Can you give us a sense for what’s going on, what you’re at liberty to talk about?
Fisher: Yeah, I definitely can give some insight on that. In the last few weeks, there have been at least four students at UO who have had their visas revoked and have been asked to self-deport within 15 days from that happening. The reason for a lot of these visa revocations is due to unspecified criminal charges that either weren’t serious or were dismissed. But DHS uses an AI tracking system to scan through people and these people got flagged, and they got their visas revoked essentially.
Miller: So to be clear, in Eugene, at the U of O, these students haven’t been arrested, they haven’t been taken to detention facilities. But there is the threat of that, and the possibility of deportation proceedings if they don’t self deport?
Fisher: Yeah, basically.
Miller: Do you know what kinds of decisions these students have made?
Fisher: I know that all four of the students that we know of on record are working with immigration lawyers to try and figure out what they can do about their situations. The university student government has been providing them with funding to pay for a lot of these immigration lawyers, but it’s still pretty up in the air.
Miller: We did reach out to the administration, and we got a statement this morning. I’ll read part of it.
“The University of Oregon welcomes and cares deeply for our international students, faculty and staff. The recent visa revocations by the Department of Homeland Security are an unprecedented action and the University of Oregon is committed to supporting our students who’ve been affected.”
“Specifically,” they wrote in the statement, “the staff who support international students in the division of Global Engagement have been working tirelessly and directly with the impacted students while protecting their privacy. The university has connected students with advising and support services and informed them of options for legal assistance. We are also committed to supporting their continued academic progress.”
I’m curious, Jess, if you know of international students whose visas have not been revoked, but who are considering changing plans, who are thinking about no longer studying in the U.S.?
Fisher: UOYDSA, we have a really good relationship with the graduate student union at UO, the GTFF. And we’ve heard from them that a lot of their international members are afraid to come onto campus, and there are those people who are considering switching to remote options for school or just taking a break and figuring stuff out. It’s definitely causing an impact.
Miller: I want to go through your specific demands of the administration. The first has to do with information sharing. What are you asking the university to not do?
Fisher: Our first demand is defend our students. So we want the university to cease compliance with the Department of Homeland Security as well as ICE and other federal agencies information gathering, with or without a warrant. So this includes not releasing student ID photos, contact information, class schedules, workplace, or the existence of code of conduct violations, not divulging student involvement in clubs, rallies, political organizing, and not publishing photos at any of those demonstrations either.
Miller: I want to read one more part of the statement that we got this morning from the administration because it has a direct bearing on this. They wrote this:
“When it comes to protecting students on campus, we follow state law and in accordance with federal privacy law, we do not volunteer information about our students, nor have we engaged in anticipatory compliance. The university has not released conduct information, student involvement records, nor any photos or videos of students engaged in their First Amendment right to free speech.”
So just so I understand this demand that you outlined, is it more that you’re afraid of what they might do? Or you’re saying that you’ve been doing this, and we want you to stop? If I understand you correctly and if I read their statement correctly, they’re saying, “we’re not doing these things right now” and you’re saying, “don’t do them.” Am I missing something?
Fisher: No, that’s correct. We don’t want them to do it, and they really haven’t so far. But we just want to make sure that that doesn’t happen in the future.
Miller: There is one piece that I want to get more clarity on. Because you said that you don’t want them to share any information with immigration authorities, whether they have a warrant or not, whether, say, ICE officials have a warrant or not. As I understand Oregon’s sanctuary law, there is a carveout for state or local law enforcement or government agencies that they can assist federal immigration authorities if there is a judicial warrant. You’re saying you don’t want them to do that even if there is a warrant to ignore a warrant from a federal judge?
Fisher: Yes, that is correct.
Miller: I want to turn to the next demand that you’re making. It has to do with student protests. This is a little bit related to what you’re saying before, but what exactly is the issue here?
Fisher: The issue with this, this goes into our second demand, which is defending free speech. We want the University of Oregon to stop surveilling the student body and using collected surveillance data to target non-citizens. So, every time we have a big rally or protest or demonstration on campus, there’s always a team of administrators that are watching us and paying attention to whether we’re following the rules or not and enforcing their code of conduct.
Every time we use amplified noise, we are likely breaking the code of conduct. At other universities, students who are getting involved in these protests are being punished for it, and DHS has been using that as grounds to revoke visas and disappear people.
We want the University of Oregon to not charge our student protesters with code of conduct violations for speaking out or participating in these demonstrations. The weaponization of this policy against protesters is a direct attack on our rights to free speech and protest and encourages further federal overreach. So, we want the University of Oregon to commit itself to protecting these rights.
Miller: Did you see administration officials or university employees videotaping you, filming you at the rally this past Friday?
Fisher: There were so many people at the rally this past Friday, and I was MCing it so I wasn’t really paying attention. But every other demonstration we’ve had this year, yes, we have seen somebody there, we’ve recognized someone. We know who a lot of them are at this point, and they’re writing down our names, they’re writing down our ID numbers, they are taking pictures of us. Yeah.
Miller: A related demand is not about information that might be shared with immigration officials, but sort of the opposite, information that you want the university to share with the school with the student community. What exactly do you want them to do with the alert system?
Fisher: Basically, we have an alert system that goes out to every student every time there’s reported crime on campus or near campus, or something dangerous is happening. We want the university to use its alert system to notify the student body by email and text of any ICE activity near or on campus. And we want these alerts to be sent out as soon as possible after the university receives credible information on ICE activity.
Miller: How are you imagining that information would be used? Let’s say the university says, “fine, we’ll do this.” And say you got an alert on your cell phone that says, “we have reason to believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are doing something now on campus.” What would you or others do with that information?
Fisher: At the rally, we were passing out a partition that we got almost 500 signatures on which was like our ‘ICE watch’. We would want all students to know if you are at risk of being detained or you’re afraid of coming into contact with ICE on campus, you’d be able to leave, you would be able to get yourself to a safe place. And then also we would want a mass of students to come in and protest them, get them off our campus, tell them to leave, basically.
Miller: Your third demand is more broad. It’s that the university basically act more like Harvard this week, and less like Columbia a few weeks ago, and fight back against what are universally seen as unprecedented federal demands of higher education institutions. But as you know, the stakes are really high. How do you think about the balance between a loss of academic freedom on the one hand, and the possibility of the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding on the other?
Fisher: I think that the university administration has to promise us to protect these departments that are at risk of losing their funding and DEI initiatives if they are pressured by this federal administration, or if funding is cut. UO has a $2.5 billion endowment, and we want them to utilize that to preserve existing departments, research, and programs in the absence of federal funding.
Miller: Jess Fisher, thanks very much.
Fisher: Thank you so much.
Miller: Jess Fisher is a steering committee member for the UO Young Democratic Socialists of America.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
