Teaming Up With ICE
ICE has new partners at Florida International University: the campus police.
Adlai Coleman reports on the impact and growing fear among students and faculty when their school agrees to have its campus police trained as ICE officers, empowered to conduct immigration enforcement.
- MS
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The news broke as David was attending a meeting of the Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter at Florida International University (FIU). That meeting in April had been planned, in part, to discuss a campaign to ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from the FIU campus. But just as the meeting began, The Miami Herald reported that FIU had signed an agreement with ICE that would allow FIU police to train as ICE officers and begin immigration enforcement operations on campus.
“The immediate response was fear,” said Lael Licht, a graduate student at FIU and, along with David, co-chair of the YDSA chapter. She and her friends were worried about what the school’s cooperation with ICE would mean. “FIU is a Hispanic serving institution.”
Then a fellow YDSA member showed David an email from her professor: An undocumented student had stopped showing up to class a week before. The student wasn’t the type to miss class, and the student hadn’t reached out to their professor to explain the extended absence.
David had already heard about the absence, but now the professor’s email took on a grim urgency. The professor worried that the student had been detained by ICE. David couldn’t help but fear the same.
“When it happens in your backyard, it hits you even harder,” said David. (A pseudonym to protect their privacy and safety; David uses they/them pronouns.)
The agreement didn’t come as a total surprise. Rumors had been swirling on campus for weeks as public colleges and universities across Florida signed similar memoranda, known as “287(g) agreements.” FIU police had actually signed the agreement over a month before the news broke, without any public acknowledgment, according to the Herald.
Many on the FIU campus saw the agreement as the most recent development in a quiet, insidious trend that has unfolded on campus. It was “part of a pattern,” said Tania Cepero-Lopez, an associate teaching professor of English at FIU, and president of the faculty union, “a pattern of internal procedures that are being put in place that we are worried will eventually lead to the destruction of academic freedom.”
In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis, with the aid of majorities in both state houses, signed the Stop Woke Act, which prohibited “discriminatory instruction” in “the workplace and in public schools.” The law, eventually struck down by the courts, attempted to forbid any teaching that suggested people experience oppression or privilege on the basis of race, sex, or nationality. That spring, DeSantis also signed into law a bill mandating transparency requirements for public college curricula, such as the posting of course materials 45 days in advance of the start of the semester. It also weakened tenure protections.
“That’s the first time that I remember that sort of intrusion,” Cepero-Lopez said.
The subsequent years saw a flurry of legislation that limited academic freedom and the power of teachers and professors at Florida public schools. This included bills passed in 2023 that sought to weaken the power of public sector unions, including public teachers unions, as well as prohibit colleges and universities from using state and federal funds on diversity, or so-called “DEI,” programs that DeSantis called a “veneer to impose an ideological agenda.”
At the same time, DeSantis and his allies instituted what The Guardian characterized as a “hostile, right wing, takeover” of the New College of Florida, a tiny liberal arts college in Sarasota, shuttering the gender studies department and replacing the entirety of the school’s leadership.
Yet even as David watched the transformation of Florida’s higher education landscape, they began to question their desire to leave the state. They had moved there from Colombia in 2013, along with their mother and brother. In 2020, David had become a naturalized citizen but still felt uncertain about a future in Florida.
David had gotten involved in progressive politics while in high school, volunteering with the Democratic Socialists of America. They were determined to continue this work in college, and decided that it was more important to do so in South Florida than anywhere else. “This is a place where I’ve lived for most of my life,” they said. “I have to stay here and fight here.”
By the time David arrived at FIU in the fall of 2024, the campus was already in the midst of tumultuous changes.
Despite its reputation as largely apolitical, FIU was not immune from the political turmoil that swept across college campuses in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas attacks and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. “After October 7,” recalled Joncarlo Ospina, who received his bachelors from FIU last spring and is currently pursuing a masters degree, “stuff on campus changed really, really quickly.”
The YDSA and other student organizations at FIU began organizing pro-Palestine demonstrations. In February of 2024, Ospina was arrested by FIU police after a walk-out demonstration. He was charged with battery of a law enforcement officer, a felony, after an officer alleged that Ospina had grabbed him and tried to pull him into the crowd of protestors. Ospina denied this allegation, and all criminal and academic conduct charges against Ospina were eventually dropped.
In August, the state university system implemented a statewide curriculum review, looking for content with “anti-Israel bias” or “antisemitic material.” In addition, the board of governors mandated that before every semester all faculty sign an “attestation form” that their curriculum includes only “materials [that] are appropriate for the course.”
Some FIU faculty saw this requirement as further infringement on academic integrity. Still, most professors decided simply to sign the form. “The problem is that all these different things seem reasonable individually, right?” said Cepero-Lopez.
When viewed together, however, Cepero-Lopez saw a pattern. “We are being stripped of the ability to decide curriculum, to decide how we teach the course,” she said. “A lot of faculty see this as just one more nail in the coffin.”
The second Trump administration represented a turning point for David. They watched, from afar, as ICE agents arrested student activists like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and Rumeyza Ozturk at Tufts. “That is when the real fear set in,” David said.
That February, another unexpected change rocked FIU campus. University President Kenneth Jessell, with little explanation, stepped down. “The faculty never found out why,” said Erik Camayd-Freixas, a tenured Spanish professor. “And lo and behold, the president designate was imposed.”
The FIU board of trustees, after being contacted directly by the governor’s office, according to the Associated Press, appointed DeSantis’ Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez as interim president. A few months later, the “interim” was removed from her title. “Things really changed when Nuñez came,” David said. “Now we have a politician who is coming into FIU.”
Then, in March, without consulting faculty members or student organizations, the university signed the agreement with ICE. David and YDSA quickly organized a campus protest. The faculty senate convened an emergency meeting to discuss the agreement – with FIU Police chief Alexander Casas in attendance.
“I can’t control what ICE does,” Casas said at the meeting, according to the Herald. “But if I don’t enter the agreement, I don’t have the opportunity to say, ‘call us first, let us deal with our community.’”
Camayd-Freixas, who attended the senate meeting with Chief Casas, expressed skepticism about this rationale. “It’s a smokescreen,” he said. “I said to the police chief, ‘once you turn over a student to ICE you lose all control of him.’”
Casas and the FIU police department did not respond to requests for comment.
Cepero-Lopez has since learned that four FIU police officers will be selected to undertake ICE training. The training consists of a 40-hour webinar, but the specific content of that webinar is unclear. Once trained, they will be able to undertake immigration operations on campus. They will not wear uniforms that identify their status as immigration enforcement.
She fears that the agreement has “radically eroded community-police relations at FIU,” and that the cooperation with ICE will lead to crimes going unreported and students feeling unsafe. Still, Cepero-Lopez expressed appreciation that Casas has engaged with faculty in the aftermath of the agreement, and that he is limiting the number of participating officers.
But, she added, “the chief of police could be fired tomorrow. We saw that with our president. I cannot rely on the kindness of one person in charge because tomorrow that person may not be in charge.”
David has long been proud of being outspoken in class and in assignments about their political views. Lately, however, they have felt the need to “self-censor.” They recalled an English class when everyone was asked to share their favorite book with the rest of the class. “I was gonna say, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi,” they said, “but the pressure got to me, and I just couldn’t, I just said something else.”
This culture of censorship has affected faculty, too, beyond syllabi and course descriptions. “We have to be very careful how we speak in public,” said Camayd-Freixas. “Now people kind of like, look at each other. They watch what they are saying in meetings. You don’t know who’s next door.”
Professors, said Cepero-Lopez, “are telling their grad students, don’t post on social media. Don’t tell anybody about your immigration status.”
Both David and Licht remain committed to their activism, despite the pressures to stay silent. Students and faculty continue to protest their university’s cooperation with ICE, at FIU and across Florida. David and Licht helped organize a protest during a meeting of the FIU board of trustees in September. Earlier this month, student organizers at Florida Atlantic University unfurled a “Terminate 287(g)” banner at a student government meeting.
Still, both say they have friends who have stopped going to protests and who have stopped speaking out publicly, for fear of their immigration status being challenged. David says that when distributing flyers on campus for the YDSA’s “sanctuary campus” campaign, people routinely ask them how to get involved without doing “anything public.”
Meanwhile, David followed up about the student who had disappeared from class. The student was not detained, but had stopped coming to campus for fear of being picked up by ICE.
- Adlai Coleman
Extra Credit
Hundreds of student journalists across the country are documenting the impact of the Trump administration’s actions on their campuses. Each week, CollegeWatch will be sharing some of the remarkable reporting coming out of these school publications – because it is great work, and because many of these stories would otherwise go untold.
Here are three important stories from the past week:
The Daily Campus at the University of Connecticut reported on mounting opposition to the university’s relationship with the New Haven-based Avelo Airlines, which “entered an agreement with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April 2025 to begin deportation flights for the agency.”
Numerous alumni asked the university to end its relationship with Avelo, according to emails obtained by The Daily Campus. In another exchange with colleagues about how the university is responding to outreach and inquiries about the relationship, Michael Kirk, UConn’s Vice President for Communications, said he “would prefer not to respond.”
The Cornell Daily Sun at Cornell University reported, through a mix of data visualizations and analysis, on how the university’s settlement with the Trump administration compares with other recent deals.
“Cornell agreed to pay $30 million to the federal government and invest an additional $30 million into research to strengthen U.S. agriculture over the next three years, marking the second-highest payment to the federal government and overall settlement amount thus far.”
Columbia’s deal remains the highest, with the university agreeing to pay the federal government $200 million. Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia, the story notes, were not required to pay the federal government anything.
The Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan reported on the faculty senate’s vote to preemptively reject the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
They also voted on a motion “urging Michigan Medicine to resume gender-affirming care for individuals under the age of 19.” The University decided in August to end such care, “citing a federal criminal and civil investigation against the institution.”
“We continue to capitulate to the demands of those unsupported by research and the bullying of the current administration,” said Shanna Kattari, associate professor of social work and women’s studies, during the meeting. “We have no right to call ourselves the leaders and best, only followers who have bent the knee.”