Illustration By Carla Labto / The SWC Sun
Editorial
It is no longer a secret that ICE is an existential threat to millions of Americans of color. Donald Trump has turned a once-professional, low-key team of law enforcement personnel into his own private brown shirt army on a mission to depopulate the United States of non-White people. If you do not believe us read Trump’s “Project 2025” playbook. It is all there.
America’s most diverse institute of higher education is populated with virtually every kind of human being from every inhabited continent, including many thousands of the kind Trump and ICE detest. Depending on what source you read on the Southwestern College website, we are between 89 – 94 percent people of color. We are immigrants, refugees and DREAMERS. We are the multicultural borderlands embodied.
That puts us squarely in the crosshairs of the White supremacy movement and its paramilitary soldiers in ICE. They have got our attention.
All of this makes us scratch our heads in utter disbelief that college leaders failed to communicate even one time in the past year with students about its policies related to ICE and its plans to keep students safe on Southwestern College’s Chula Vista, Otay Mesa, San Ysidro and National City campuses. It was not until a small group of students addressed the governing board that Southwestern College leadership lifted a finger to speak to us about ICE.
College President Dr. Mark Sanchez should have taken that board meeting as a wake-up call and made a course correction. Instead he phoned it in with a sloppy hand-made video that left us with the impression that he is checked out and planning his retirement.
It is absolutely true that Sanchez, Police Chief Marco Bareno and other college leaders have communicated adequately with faculty and staff about ICE contingencies. For more than a year faculty have been advised to remain calm and professional should ICE enter campus. They have been asked not to cooperate in efforts to locate and arrest students. They have been urged to call campus police and let the chief or the college president handle things.
Fair enough, so why radio silence with students?
We know the people who run Southwestern College have a lot on their plates and manage multiple priorities, but this is administrative malpractice. Faculty and students are bombarded with messages from the college, including reems that are trivial. Why would any of our well-educated leaders think that keeping students in the dark about a looming danger like ICE was a good idea?
We appreciate that Academic Senate faculty and trustees Robert Moreno and Kristine Galicia-Brown gave props to students who spoke up. We do, too. We hope our college is actually as committed to the well-being of its students as it claims to be. We are anxious about ICE and white supremacy in our community. Our neighbors have been arrested. We feel vulnerable. We know that ICE is headquartered here and has a huge privately run detention center at its disposal to stash people like us. We are constantly looking over our shoulders. Attending college right now is risky, but it is important to us, so we are taking the risk.
We hope our college leaders see a learning opportunity here. Moments like this matter. Timely and inclusive communication is more than helpful…it is essential.
We are not asking for perfection, but we expect presence.
We already felt distance between our aloof college president, but the chasm is widening. He does not seem to have his head in the game. Students are treated like product and data points, not people with hopes, dreams and fears.
ICE is hanging over us like the Sword of Damocles. Students are asking what you are doing to keep us safe. Are you listening?
