30 March, 2025
University students occupy a unique position in which they are instructed on liberatory theoretical frameworks, histories of civil disobedience and justice, and critical thinking, and yet, when the time comes for an urgent and meaningful application of this learning, they are discouraged or even punished for doing so. Curriculum on a long history of protest movements – the desegregation movements of the sixties, the peace movements of the seventies, the anti-apartheid movements of the eighties and nineties – demands their attention, but if it inspires their action to disrupt the steadily churning machinery of the institution, they, and in particular, those among them who are racialized and non-citizens, will become targets for sanctions.
These punishments often function through a nativist process termed “crimmigration” (Stumpf 2006, Menjivar 2018), a conflation of immigration law and civil law that predisposes international and non-citizen students to harm through criminal and administrative policies, on-campus policing and surveillance, and code of conduct amendments that penalize demonstrative action. University crimmigration policies operate as a racialized system of targeted discrimination that undermines the ethos of higher learning institutions.
Crimmigration is an expansion of policing and surveillance beyond the border that is “intimately tied to the racialization…of certain groups of immigrants” (Menjivar 2018, p. 1) and functions through the legal widening of definitions for criminalized behaviors. The 1988 creation of the “aggravated felony” offense, for example, lengthened the list of immigrant behaviors that constituted deportable crimes, many of which were petty or non-violent (Menjivar 2018). These policies resulted in the racial profiling, surveillance, and detainment of immigrants of color and were predicated on “alarmist discourses” (Menjivar 2018, p. 3) that drew ideological boundaries between white citizens and non-white non-citizens. It was through such a process that Chinese international UCLA graduate student Liu Lijun, who organized in protest of the university’s financial ties to war-making overseas, had her student visa revoked and is facing deportation (Abdi 2025). Liu Lijun was arrested on campus during a demonstration because her advocacy allegedly violated a recent Presidential Executive Order that defined pro-Palestinian international student demonstrators as “terrorists” and criminals (Florido 2025). The highest political office in the country penned the legislation that targeted Liu Lijun, the media reporting employed the alarmist language of crimmigration, and the UCLA administration not only facilitated Liu Lijun’s arrest but allowed for the deployment of heavily armed police that seriously injured over one hundred student demonstrators, many of whom were hospitalized (Abdi 2025). Together, this crimmigration schema positioned student assembly, demonstration, and speech as so perilous a threat to peace and order that the assault of hundreds of students was an acceptable price to pay for its reinstatement.
Universities have a long such history as non-state actors for police and immigration enforcement. In the 1990s, this legal expansion of criminalized behaviors was made retroactive and, in a novel turn, afforded local law enforcement jurisdiction over migration (Menjivar 2018). Policies expanding border enforcement to local agencies “accentuates the pluralization of migration policing” (Walsh, 2018, p. 326). Universities, by design, replicate systems of surveillance through a baseline of seemingly innocuous methods, from verifying identities and maintaining electronic surveillance systems to reporting non-compliance. This surveillance intensifies for international and non-citizen students as universities are “increasingly made responsible for managing foreign students by engaging in routine practices of monitoring, profiling, and accounting that facilitate the identification and removal of those in contravention of migration law” (Walsh 2019, p. 327). The subsequent collusion with immigration and policing authorities thus turns the university into a site of punishment rather than education, and because non-citizen students tend to come from non-Western countries, these punishments invariably come with racialized consequences, rhetorics, and intents. Universities, in this way, fail to provide equitable access, rights, and protections for their students.
These racialized consequences of conceptualizations of “illegality” and “deportability” are further made clear in the case of Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil is a Columbia University graduate student and was a key negotiator and organizer in the 2024 protests for university divestment from weapons manufacturing (Al Jazeera 2025). During the protests, Columbia deployed police units to arrest students, suspended and disciplined others, and even revoked earned degrees. On March 9, 2025, they complied with border and immigration agents in the political arrest of Mahmoud Khalil from his on-campus residence. Khalil, who has Palestinian ancestry, is a legal permanent resident and is married to a U.S. citizen, was then taken to an undisclosed location. Immigration agents informed his family and lawyers that his residency was to be revoked and he was to be deported (Al Jazeera 2025). Like Liu Lijun, his criminalization and detention were carried out on the grounds of his political action, his residency status, and his race, and the rhetoric used to justify it represented him as a terrorist despite the clear violations of the protection of speech and assembly entitled to him.
Such rhetoric is the backbone of targeted state violence. Political and media discourses that frame non-citizens as dangerous criminals, terrorists, and threats to national security “have led to the unprecedented expansion of bureaucratic systems of mass detention and deportation” (Menjivar 2018, p. 8) and further frame international student dissenters as threats to the peace and the institution itself. During the 1968 San Francisco State Strike, in which the Black Student Union led the longest student-led strike in history to demand equitable access and a representative curriculum, university administration mobilized local police to arrest and assault dozens of students on campus (Anath 2019), instructing police to impose “law and order” with “whatever…force necessary” (p. 109). This force included the bloody beating of students that resulted in significant injuries such as skull fractures and head lacerations (Ananth 2019). The racialized rhetorical framing of student protestors as disruptors of the peace gave both campus administration and local law enforcement impunity to brutalize, criminalize, and expel students, the majority of whom were Black. Though concessions were ultimately made – and a curriculum established that set the groundwork for the university cultural studies courses we attend and benefit from today – the administration also used the precedent set during the strike to increase policing on university campuses and tighten their bonds with law enforcement agencies (Ananth 2019). This increased collaboration had a disparate effect on immigrant racialized students in later years, as in the 1979 “Iran Hostage Crisis,” when California university administrations enforced compliance with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “Students with Iranian citizenship in the SCU system instantly became targets of administrative and state intervention” (Ananth 2018, p. 116), and while only federal agents can issue immigration warrants, police and campus security worked in tandem to assist in their aims through surveillance, identification, and admittance to university grounds, and by enforcing civil and institutional codes which targeted immigrant, racialized, and international students (Ananth 2018). As in the case of Mahmoud Khalil and Liu Lijun, universities are culpable in the violation of international students, whose rights to free speech and assembly are not protected or respected in the way that white and nationalized students are.
Beyond the moral implications inherent in the systemic deprivation of the rights and protections of non-citizens unequal to citizens, there are economic, technological, and political considerations. International students who witness the mistreatment of non-citizen students at U.S. institutions may choose to study elsewhere, taking with them the capital and relationships their attendance would have provided the institution (Walsh 2018). The technology required to surveil students, moreover, is flawed, and opportunities for misuse and mistake abound (Walsh 2018). Students, native and non-native alike, should be wary of what it means for their institutions to employ such means against all of them, with the intent to identify, criminalize, and sanction them. Fear of being marked as out of order for political action sets a precedent that normalizes state retaliation for political participation. It need not be this way. Different policies are possible to maintain and repair the trust of students in their institutions; the University of Minnesota, for example, discontinued its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department for large events after Student Body President Jael Kerandi wrote to the administration demanding change (Walsh 2018). Though this is a small step, it represents one accessible and possible for other universities to adopt, transitioning to a culture of higher learning institutions that do not function as de-facto border guards.
University students are entitled to a reasonable provision of safety to self-express, exercise their rights, and impact meaningful change in the world around them. Campus crimmigration policies, which target international and immigrant students, not only subject these students to discriminatory treatment but also negatively impact native-born students by normalizing violence against them, and exist in antithesis to the ethos of higher learning institutions. Student solidarity and awareness of this institutionalized and systemic violence are prerequisites to making the higher learning environment an inclusive one for every student, and university integrity and ability to provide this inclusive environment requires a critical audit of on-campus policing, surveilling, and sanctioning of those students who have the conviction to speak up about the issues that matter to them, no matter where they are.
Works Cited:
Abdi, A. (2025). “Chinese UCLA Student Liu Lijun Has Student Visa Revoked after Organizing Pro-Palestine Rallies.” University Magazine Canada, February 1. Retrieved February 23, 2025 (https://www.universitymagazine.ca/chinese-ucla-student-liu-lijun-has-student-visa-revoked-after-organizing-pro-palestine-rallies/).
Ananth, A. L., & Leiva, P. (2019). Policing the People’s University: The Precarity of Sanctuary in the California State University System. Social Justice (San Francisco, Calif.), 46(4 (158)), 107–120.
Anon. (2025). “US Arrests Second Student, Imposes ‘Receivership’ on Columbia University.” Al Jazeera English. Retrieved March 14, 2025 (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-arrests-second-student-imposes-receivership-on-columbia-university/ar-AA1AWu61?ocid=BingNewsSerp).
Breed, A. & Gecker, J. (2024). “How the Current Police Response to Anti-War Campus Protestors Compares to Those in the Last Century.” PBS, May 2. Retrieved February 23, 2025 (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-the-current-police-response-to-anti-war-campus-protestors-compares-to-those-in-the-last-century).
Florido, A. & Martinez, A. (2025). “Trump Executive Order Aims to Deport International Students Who Have Protested Israel.” NPR, February 6. Retrieved February 23, 2025 (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5281179/trump-executive-order-aims-to-deport-international-students-who-have-protested-israel).
Menjívar, C., Gómez Cervantes, A., & Alvord, D. (2018). The expansion of “crimmigration,” mass detention, and deportation. Sociology Compass, 12(4).
Walsh, J. P. (2019). Education or enforcement? Enrolling universities in the surveillance and policing of migration. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 71(4), 325–344.
BN Russo 