Xavier Maciel, a first-year transfer student at Pomona College, was in a crowded room as the results of the presidential election came in. He was born in the United States, but his parents and sister were not, and he stared at the television screen in disbelief as Hillary Clinton conceded to Donald J. Trump.
While campaigning, Mr. Trump was particularly combative in his rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, pledging to deport millions and to eliminate the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA, which gives some undocumented young people two years to work and live in the United States without fear of deportation.
The day after the election, faculty members at Pomona circulated a letter proposing that the California college become a sanctuary campus — an idea similar to a sanctuary city, where officials limit cooperation with immigration authorities’ deportation efforts.
In the week following the election, people at more than 50 other colleges have devised similar petitions, according to a spreadsheet Mr. Maciel created to track them. On the list are, among others, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, and Brown University, where Naoko Shibusawa, an associate professor of history and American studies, thought of the idea after a student came to her office crying inconsolably the day after the election.
