In response to the ongoing cruel and unconstitutional raids on immigrants and their communities by the Trump administration, NLG law student chapters are organizing to stop recruitment efforts at their law schools by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).
In late January, New York University (NYU) NLG initiated a campaign to demand that NYU uninvite and permanently bar ICE and DHS from all NYU-affiliated events, including the Public Interest Legal Career Fair (PILC). As they wrote in a letter outlining their demands, “Working with and welcoming ICE recruiters into our community is abhorrent in general, but even more so now, in the wave of violently anti-immigrant executive orders, escalated ICE raids, and the stripping of due process rights for noncitizens through the Laken Riley Act.” The letter received signatures from more than 1,000 individual students and more than 75 student organizations from 15 of 19 participating law schools. NYC legal worker unions Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA) and Legal Services Staff Association (LSSA) publicly supported these efforts, and at least seven employers dropped out of the PILC fair to protest ICE involvement. As a result of student organizing, ICE cancelled drop-in interviews planned during the NYU PILC fair, but still participated in a limited capacity when NYU refused students’ demand to remove them.
The same week, the NLG chapter at American University Washington College of Law also issued a statement against the involvement of ICE and DHS at AU’s Spring Externship Fair: “WCL NLG stands against the decision to allow ICE and DHS to recruit our classmates to participate in the dehumanization, disruption, and destruction of immigrant communities.” While initially the school refused to uninvite these organizations, the DHS Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) and ICE pulled out of the Spring Externship Fair the night before and were no longer listed as attendees.
These examples encouraged other NLG law school chapters to challenge the inclusion of Office of the OPLA and ICE at their school career fairs. Emory NLG in Atlanta wrote a sign-on letter calling on the school to refuse to invite these entities to future career fairs, speaking engagements, or university-sponsored events, arguing, “Inviting ICE onto campus and to our job fairs directly harms students. For one, many students here are immigrants themselves. To invite people from the agency that has been known for cruel treatment of migrants is to belittle the trauma suffered by many students at the hands of these ideals. Furthermore, ICE is engaged in the exact kinds of behavior that harms many students, regardless of immigration status.” Twenty other law school organizations from three Georgia universities signed onto the letter in solidarity.
In Colorado, the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and University of Colorado Law NLG chapters drafted a petition that received over 1,000 signatures from students, staff, faculty, and community members within the first day. After the petition and sign-ons were sent to university administration, ICE voluntarily dropped out of the career fair. As the letter explains, “The use of the Public Interest Career Fair as recruiting grounds for ICE flies in the face of these alleged values and endangers students, faculty, and staff who have been targeted by ICE amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment and action.” University of Colorado NLG helped organize a demonstration the day of the career fair to demand the university become a sanctuary campus.
This organizing campaign is far from over! Other NLG chapters are currently applying these methods at their law schools to pressure administrations to end recruitment efforts by ICE, DHS, and CBP, most recently at the University of Washington. NLG students are writing statements of support to other NLG chapters, strategizing on ways to establish sanctuary campuses, and planning new and innovative ways to push back against this attack on immigrants. When we fight, we win!