Dispatch #8: Jackbooted Campuses and Growing Resistance

August 19, 2025

Greetings from the Swamp.

As our semester begins at Swamp University, we learn our campus police have formally signed the 287(g) agreement that makes them proxies for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As I mentioned in a previous post, such an agreement serves as an affront to the very mission of our university that once prided itself on being a Hispanic-serving institution and providing relatively low tuition costs to make a college degree relatively affordable for many first-generation college students. You won’t hear much public celebrating about LGTQ+, Black, women’s, and Latinx histories anymore on campus as the state continues to threaten the elimination of financial support for any initiatives that whiff of the threat of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” (D.E.I.) categories so nebulously defined that they mean both everything and nothing.

But this is a part of the authoritarian plan against public higher education: place universities in a existential terror with ambiguous laws and the threat of budget shortfalls. As Christopher Rufo, a Far-Right troll who has been promoted to an architect of fear leading the fight for a white-washed history and sanitized college curriculum, notes:

A medium- or long-term goal of mine is to figure out how to adjust the formula of finances from the federal government to the universities in a way that puts them in an existential terror and have them say, Unless we change what we’re doing, we’re not going to be able to meet our budget for the year. We’re going to have to wind certain things down and then make the universities make those hard decisions.

ICE’s partnership with the campus police is the jackbooted flipside of the ideological attack that polemicists like Rufo, DeSantis, and Trump launched against what can and cannot be studied on college campuses. It doesn’t attack the curriculum. It attacks the students themselves, particularly those belonging to the most diverse and affordable campuses. It creates a culture of fear for those who might be suspected of being undocumented. It places an already somewhat distant and inaccessible institution of higher education for many first-generation college students further out of reach by manufacturing yet another obstacle other than tuition costs and navigating the bureaucratic hurdles of applying for college that many students already face.

In case there is any doubt about who is being targeted by ICE, self-proclaimed “border czar” Tom Homan makes it perfectly clear when he recently stated that ICE agents don’t need probable cause but can use people’s “physical appearance” in addition to other criteria to detain them. Needless to say, such rationale provides a short step to racial profiling, which has led to a series of lawsuits against ICE in California.

The New York Times has recently referred to the “collateral-damage” that practices like eliminated funding against D.E.I. initiatives have had upon community colleges and their vocational training of students. But such a framing of the issue completely misses the mark: the intent of such policies is precisely to make college less accessible to those who have been historically boxed out of higher education.

The playbook goes like this:

1)     Reduce the subjects that can be taught on campuses to not to reflect the interests of a diverse student body.

2)     Eliminate the meager attempts that colleges and universities have made to increase access to working-class college students and people of color.

3)     Place ICE on campus to further make students feel unwelcome.

Ultimately, place as many roadblocks to higher education as possible in order to forcibly transform it back into a nineteenth century elitist boys club where power can be further consolidated while white supremacist sensibilities and patriarchal swagger can roam freely.

“Make College Great Again,” if you will.

Our community, however, is not taking this lying down. Resistance is starting to grow. ACLU Florida will be holding an online Know Your Rights for Immigrants for faculty and staff on September 2 at 6:30 PM. For the sake of security, one needs to RSVP to attend it. Given the radio silence from university administrators about what to do on campus when interacting with immigration enforcement, the training offers valuable information of how to stay within the bounds of the law without placing students, staff, and faculty under undue risk.

On September 5, students will be holding a protest on our campus at 3 pm at the Student Union (1995 Dave Avenue, Boca Raton). Faculty, staff, and the surrounding community are encouraged to attend and participate. Such policies impact all of us in South Florida.

Finally, our Solidarity Cinema Series will be holding a screening focusing upon immigration on October 9 at 7 PM in our movie theaters (CU 107). We will be showing two shorts: Boat People (2025), concerning Haitian immigrants detained in Guantanamo Bay, and Black Girl (1966), the first independent Black Senegalese film by Ousmane Sembene that follows the difficulties of a Senegalese woman who works for a wealthy French couple on the French Riviera. Al’lkens Plancher, the director of Boat People, will be part of a Q&A joined by Renata Bozzetto, Deputy Director of the Florida Immigrant Rights Coalition.

Please share any information of actions in your neck of the woods to keep us updated and that we can pass along to others. Only through such exchange, unified actions, and solidarity can we keep moving forward by having our campuses better serve our diverse communities where difference is not something to be avoided but embraced and negotiated, where we come to terms with our shared histories and the ways in which the past still shapes us in order to persevere and forge in new directions away from the shriveled authoritarian fantasies that currently swirl around us.

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