n the past few weeks, Xavier Maciel, a first-year transfer student at Pomona College, has on more than one occasion woken up to over a dozen emails from college professors across the country.
After the presidential election, he created a spreadsheet to track which colleges were circulating petitions to become “sanctuary campuses” — an idea similar to sanctuary cities, where officials will not cooperate with the deportation efforts of federal immigration authorities. Each morning, he fields emails from faculty or students wanting to add their college’s petition to his list; it now has over 150 institutions on it.
Petitions and protests in support of undocumented immigrant studentssprang up at colleges nationwide in the weeks following the election, spurred by President-elect Donald J. Trump’s promise to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that the Obama administration put in place through executive action. That policy, often called DACA, granted some young people who are in the country without proper legal authorization the ability to live and work in the United States for renewable two-year increments without fear of deportation.
