College students are petitioning that their schools become sanctuary campuses where illegal immigrant students can be protected from the imminent deportation that will happen when president-elect Donald Trump sits in office on January 2017.
The schools being petitioned to become sanctuary campuses include Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, University of Connecticut and University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to CBN News. There have also been calls to protect the families of such students, although no plans have been laid out on how to do this.
In an interview with ‘60 Minutes’ at CBS, Trump said he plans to deport at least 3 million people next year. He also confirmed he will construct a wall along the Mexico border like he said during the campaign.
His main target for deportation would be those involved in criminal acts and have criminal records.
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” he said, according to CBS News. “But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.”
On Wednesday, students from New York University and New Jersey University walked out of their classes to protest Trump’s immigration plans. Simultaneously, other students in California and Florida carried out similar protests.
Protest organizers said the day was specificially for the petitioning of sanctuary campuses. They encouraged students to put themselves “between Trump and our undocumented students,” NBC News reported.
The faculty of Brown University wrote a letter asking the school administration to take measures to protect students who could be affected by Trump’s immigration plans. The letter, signed by 168 faculty members, was published in the student paper.
“We have reason to believe that Providence Police officers cannot enter the campus without permission of the University,” the letter said. “Given that many students, staff members and their families are directly affected by this issue, we urge the University to immediately work to develop a protocol for the University serving as a sanctuary campus.”
Trump said at the interview with ‘60 Minutes’ that once the border is secure, his team will then determine what would happen to undocumented immigrants left inside the U.S.
“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about who are terrific people,” he said. “But before we make that determination ... it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.”
