Campuses No Longer Off-Limits to ICE
Sara Weissman
February 6, 2025
The Trump administration cleared the way for immigration enforcement officers to take action on campuses, sowing fear among undocumented students. Higher ed leaders are struggling with how to respond.
A Temple University student was arrested over the weekend after allegedly impersonating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on campus. The university reported that two people pretended to be ICE agents at a local store on Saturday, wearing shirts that read “ICE” and “police,” while another person recorded them—just days after an ICE raid nearby in North Philadelphia.
Though the incident was a false alarm, the presence of ICE agents on college campuses is a lot less far-fetched now than it would have been several weeks ago. On President Donald Trump’s second day in office, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security rescinded protections for “sensitive areas,” like churches, hospitals, schools and college campuses, where immigration enforcement actions previously couldn’t take place. Under a former version of the policy, issued by the Biden administration in 2021, ICE agents were to avoid operating in these areas “to the fullest extent possible” in order not to “restrain people’s access to essential services.”
That’s not the case anymore.
