Why Sanctuary Campus Now?
Sanctuary is a love-based movement that emerged to give harbor to people displaced by US-supported civil wars in Central America in the 1980s. The movement evolved as the Bush II and Obama administrations ramped up deportations and migrant justice advocates protected people at risk of removal and worked to cut ties between local law enforcement and the federal deportation apparatus. It resurged with the first Trump administration, which relentlessly targeted migrants through its border and interior enforcement policies, as seen in the so-called Muslim Ban and the zero tolerance border policy that led to thousands of family separations at the southern border.
In 2016 and 2017, students, faculty, and workers pushed universities across the nation to declare their campuses as sanctuaries. Commitments included protecting undocumented students by refusing to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials onto campus, refusing to allow campus police to enforce immigration law, and refusing to share student data with ICE.
Today, a worse storm is coming. The 2024 Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are coming for all of us. Their ultimate goal is to destroy democratic institutions and safeguards in order to consolidate power into the presidency. They identify universities as foci of progressive ideas and values and, therefore, as primary targets for their campaigns to destroy the remaining shreds of democracy. They are manufacturing consent for this consolidation of autocratic power by targeting vulnerable communities: migrants, queer and trans people, the unhoused, women and pregnant people, Arabs and Muslims, environmentalists, earth and land defenders, Indigenous nations, people of color, scientists and health practitioners, and more. It is imperative to organize our campuses against the coming assaults.
