Last Tuesday morning, Heather Squire gave up the remaining four years of her five-year PhD fellowship in UB’s Department of Environment and Sustainability to protest the university's silence amid national arrests and planned deportations of international students in recent weeks.
“I have to do something to stand up. I felt like on-campus, everybody’s paralyzed and scared and that’s not a safe place for any of us to be because it’s very uncertain on how the university is going to protect us,” Squire said.
This past week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unexpectedly terminated 13 current and former UB students’ F-1 visas, with some being attributed to traffic violations according to an immigration attorney representing an undisclosed number of students. The university declined to release specific names and details, citing federal privacy laws. In a previous statement to The Spectrum, officials said that the students were advised to leave the country and to consider seeking private legal counsel.
UB’s International Student Services office continues to communicate with and provide guidance to those impacted, university officials said in an email to The Spectrum Tuesday.
“UB is, and always has been, an international institution,” the statement reads. “Our international students’ background, perspectives and experiences greatly enhance UB’s research, education and engagement mission.”
The 13 students join over 790 others whose visas have been revoked in the past few weeks, according to the Associated Press. High-profile arrests targeted international students involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy at Columbia University and Tufts University.
ICE has not responded to any of The Spectrum’s repeated requests for comment over phone and email.
The recent revocations leave few students on-campus willing to talk. Several international students have declined to speak to The Spectrum, citing safety and privacy concerns. UB’s International Students Advisory Council has not responded to The Spectrum’s three requests for comment.
A sophomore and international student — who requested to remain anonymous, citing a need to keep a low profile due to recent events — said that the Trump administration's rhetoric and education surrounding the revokement of the visas is misguided and racially discriminatory.
“This is beyond politics and affects people’s real lives. Even people who are trying to do this [immigrate] the right way are facing challenges currently and that is not what the system promises,” they said.
Plans on how to respond are ambiguous.
Samin Bhuya, president of the undergraduate Student Association (SA), told The Spectrum Tuesday that SA offers free legal consultations and has a “Know Your Rights” campaign going on to inform students about their rights when dealing with law enforcement.
SA Advocacy Committee Chair and Senator Aidan Sumrall says that some senators are working on setting up a meeting with Dean of Students Tomás Aguirre to figure out what’s going on.
“I don’t know how much realistically we can do because a lot of it is above our heads, but what we can do is find a way to make students feel safe on campus because that’s what we do. We’re supposed to advocate for them,” Sumrall told The Spectrum last Wednesday afternoon. “We’re trying to find some middle ground. We don’t want to cause a bigger problem and mass hysteria. We’re trying to find a balance but we are trying to find stuff to do.”
The Spectrum was denied access to the meeting Wednesday afternoon. Sumrall said that the meeting is “not official Senate/SA business” and he’s going as a student to be “more educated for the advocacy purpose of the Senate” in an email to The Spectrum.
Issac Kolding, president of the Graduate Student Association (GSA), said that the GSA has distributed general information and resources in an email to graduate students, but is limited in its capacity to help.
“I think graduate students understand that the federal government is a big fish and the GSA is a small non-profit with really limited ability to make changes to immigration policy that the federal government is enacting,” Kolding said Tuesday. “We do take these things seriously, we do listen when people ask for stuff. But I think most international graduate students understand the limitations of our organization, what we’re capable of actually delivering.”
Ricardo Castillo contributed to the reporting of this article.
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor and can be reached at mylien.lai@ubspectrum.com
The news desk can be reached at news@ubspectrum.com
Mylien Lai is the senior news editor at The Spectrum. Outside of getting lost in Buffalo, she enjoys practicing the piano and being a bean plant mom. She can be found at @my_my_my_myliennnn on Instagram.
