Faculty received a five-step list regarding what to do if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, were to come onto Cal Poly’s campus.
Cal Poly, the university’s police department and the Office of University Diversity and Inclusion (OUDI) sent faculty the list on Thursday, Oct. 30 through the university’s Academic Senate, according to an email obtained by Mustang News.
Cal Poly listed ways for people to respond if ICE came to campus in its flyer, including staying calm and following protocol, understanding ICE authority, protecting privacy and communicating carefully. The university also provided additional resources from the Cal State system.
Erandy Fernandez-Ortiz, an experience industry management and comparative ethnic studies sophomore, was critical of the flyers effectiveness for faculty and students.
“Everything is so broad and vague in that flyer,” Fernandez-Ortiz said. “I don’t know how useful it would actually be and how much like peace of mind it could give professors.”
Although the flyer for Fernandez-Ortiz acts as a precautionary measure to ICE presence at Cal Poly, she ideally would like to see information from the university on how it would prevent ICE from interacting with students rather than what it would do after the fact.
Fernandez-Ortiz’s concerns speak broadly to the many issues the university faces during the current federal administration.
In January, the university shared an FAQ sheet through the OUDI website outlining Cal Poly’s response to federal immigration enforcement on campus in the wake of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation rollout.
While Cal Poly students protested against ICE last spring — as well as some who had planned to protest U.S Customs and Border Protection coming to the recent Fall Career Fair before the agency had dropped out due to the government shutdown — the university has not addressed issues surrounding immigration to the greater campus community since the beginning of the year.
With this most recent communication, Cal Poly outlined a similar list to its previous information guide for addressing ICE on campus.
Many other Cal State campuses have also disseminated information about dealing with federal immigration enforcement to their websites, all of which were in line with the public university system’s policies.
“The CSU developed this guidance as a resource for campus community members concerned about the potential for increased immigration enforcement and on our campuses,” said university spokesperson Keegan Koberl.
The recent Cal Poly flyer outlines contacts for ICE encounters on campus like George Hughes, associate vice president of public safety and the university’s designated point of contact for reporting immigration enforcement activity, as well as both university police and 911.
While the guidance sheet provides a brief understanding of what Cal Poly can do in case ICE comes on campus, the university did not comment on whether it had responded to any of the concerns from students in particular recently about federal immigration.
Mariana Perez, a comparative ethnic studies senior, found the flyer digestible at first glance, though on second thought was critical and skeptical of the university’s intention.
She said the flyer read as though it was created out of necessity for the university to prove it had addressed any issues surrounding federal immigration enforcement in and around campus, though Perez felt like the university had no intention of understanding the perspective of students with mixed documentation status on campus.
“It doesn’t take a clear stance on where Cal Poly stands in protecting its students,” Perez said.
Perez also noted that the flyer had so far only been sent directly to faculty, and she frowned upon the lack of any mass email communication that could have been distributed to the campus like it does during annual cultural heritage months.
Cal Poly abides by a policy known as “institutional neutrality,” where the university will not take a “political stance” on issues unless they reflect the whole campus community. Mustang News previously reported that this has been a longstanding policy of the university.
While growing federal immigration activity has challenged the ways people can support and inform their community about ICE arrests and immigration, some organizations and programs continue to provide resources.
At Cal Poly, the Dream Center has free legal services for all students, staff and faculty including court defense, DACA applications and renewals, family petitions, U and T visas, Violence Against Women Act, asylum and applications for lawful permanent resident status and citizenship.
On the Central Coast, 805 UndocuFund is a non-profit that gives text-alerts on ICE activity in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, as well as emergency assistance funds to people who have been impacted directly by immigration enforcement.
