The University of Illinois System said today that its campuses would not be so-called “sanctuary campuses” for undocumented immigrants, but it is unclear whether the lack of such a designation will make much of a difference in practice.
The statement was made in the wake of recent calls from students, professors and activists across the country for higher-education institutions to defy the efforts of federal agencies to enforce immigration laws on their campuses. As part of this effort, U of I students launched a petition drive to encourage the university system to obstruct the increased immigration enforcement they expect from the incoming Trump administration.
In a letter signed by the president of the University of Illinois System, its vice president and the chancellors of its three main campuses, the system made clear that “we cannot declare our campuses as sanctuaries, as the concept is not well-specified and may actually jeopardize our institution.”
Petition drives were conducted at each of the university’s three campuses: Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield. The Sanctuary Campus petition garnered only about 2,400 signatures, compared with the system’s total enrollment of over 78,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
The petition was presented to Chancellor Robert Jones and submitted to the University of Illinois Senate today at the Urbana-Champaign campus.
In its response to the petitions, the university refused to formally embrace sanctuary status, but official statement clearly said it is not promising any increased cooperation: "We are proud that the U of I System is already a leader in supporting undocumented students.”
The publicly funded system consumes more than $5.6 billion annually, but because the system pledges to “continue to protect student and employee confidential information to the fullest extent," it is unknown how many undocumented students attend the system’s schools or how many are employed in the system, perhaps even as instructors.
The concept of sanctuary campuses is modeled after the “sanctuary city” movement that has been adopted by more than 30 U.S. municipalities. As sanctuary cities, they refuse to cooperate with federal agencies in efforts to enforce immigration law.
This policy became an important issue in the 2016 presidential campaign when President-elect Donald Trump focused attention on the case of Kate Steinle, a young woman who was murdered in San Francisco, a sanctuary city, by an undocumented immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who has a long criminal record and multiple arrests by local law enforcement. Local law enforcement refused to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) before the shooting.
Among other practices, a sanctuary campus would follow this model and bar ICE officers from campus unless agents have warrants, restrict campus police from enforcing immigration law and withhold student immigration status data from ICE.
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