You can support safe(r) approaches to campus reopenings (including a default online policy) and also be against deporting international students. #thread
1. Do not conflate the immense, justice-driven and coalitional work done to protect vulnerable and marginalized people from COVID (including online teaching) with complicity with ICE. Instead, recognize how anti-immigrant racism works thru ableism to put lives at risk.
1b. The ICE rule makes faculty appear to be directly and personally responsible for choosing to teach online. This is not an individual problem. And it is ableist to assume that faculty can just revert back or were choosing online out of excess precaution. There is a pandemic.
1c. We should be focusing on collective vulnerabilities: students staying in the US (along with instructors) will be forced to put their lives at risk to learn. This was not an acceptable amount of risk two days ago and it is no more acceptable today.
1d. Don’t forget that there are disabled international students who are also entitled to COVID-related accommodations. Do not throw them under the bus.
2. Demanding safe and healthy conditions for everyone should be at the forefront. This is actually within faculty and institutional power to do. Accepting ICE’s logics makes us complicit.
2b. While well-meaning, the answer is not to volunteer to teach a 1,000 independent studies. This is not direct action because it abides by the rule. ICE needs to be challenged and the rule needs to be challenged. Universities should devote their legal resources to fighting ICE.
2c. Also remember how many of our international students are already barred from the US and unable to get back, being denied stipends or asked to go on leave until the pandemic ends because of a lack of online options.
3. Are you a recent abolitionist? Or an institution that wrote a statement about standing up to racism in all of its forms? Guess what? You have to resist ICE now.
3b. Remember all of those times that universities were neutral on the subject of deportations, or wouldn’t explicitly refuse to cooperate with ICE? Don’t let this be another one of those times. And don’t just do it for students. There are still people in cages.
