UPDATE: U.S. Customs and Border Protection will no longer be attending the career fair
Audio by Makena Locsin
U.S. Customs and Border Protection will recruit at Cal Poly’s annual career fair on Wednesday, sparking widespread outcry from student and faculty groups who view the agency’s presence as “hypocritical” and “frustrating.”
The agency, under the Department of Homeland Security, registered for the event “solely for recruiting purposes,” Mustang News previously reported.
The Latinx Cultural Association created a petition that reached over 1,500 signatures arguing against the event hosting Customs and Border Protection in the days following Mustang News’ initial report of the agency recruiting at the Fall Career Fair.
Other student organizations at Cal Poly like the Comparative Ethnic Studies Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine have organized and collaborated on ways to protest against the federal immigration agency’s planned trip to the Central Coast.
The university’s California Faculty Association Immigration Task Force also sent an email to administrators with a list of demands including taking a stance on immigration by implementing text alerts when federal immigration agents are in or around campus.
As Cal Poly continues to promote its mission towards becoming an Hispanic-Serving Institution, many students and faculty believe having Customs and Border Protection on campus is contradictory to the university’s promises — in light of the agency’s involvement in recent immigration raids targeting people who have “reasonable suspicion” of being undocumented in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago — and instead creates an environment where students feel unwelcome and unsafe.
According to Cal Poly’s policy, services hosted by the university and Career Services cannot exclude employers unless they discriminate against employees based on “national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.”
The university hosted the Department of Homeland Security, the division that oversees agencies like Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at its career fair in 2019, according to Cal Poly spokesperson Matt Lazier, and was unaware of any situation where a recruiter had been removed from the event in previous years on campus.
Customs and Border Protection, best known for overseeing Border Patrol, usually enforces immigration within 100 miles of the border, while ICE has authority to roam almost anywhere throughout the country.
“Cal Poly is committed to ensuring that our career fairs are safe, welcoming and inclusive spaces for students and recruiters to connect,” Lazier wrote in an email to Mustang News.
Cal Poly’s Fall Career Fair remains set to proceed as planned including Customs and Border Protection, Lazier wrote in an email.
Student organizations are collaborating on protest tactics for the career fair, and plan to try and educate people on why they think the federal immigration agency, as well as other potentially contentious employers like Lockheed Martin — who will also be recruiting at the career fair — are bad, said Iyad Jamaly, co-president of the Student for Justice in Palestine club.
Although the California State University’s Time, Place and Manner policy limit what Jamaly and others protesting the career fair can do on school grounds, students are planning ways to organize and demonstrate.
“This will mark the first of many steps to a mobilization of the Latino student body,” said Jose Tenoch, a biomedical engineering sophomore. “And I think we really need it.”
Student reactions to Customs and Border Protection coming to campus
Tenoch immediately began reaching out to Latino clubs and organizations around campus when he found out Customs and Border Protection would be at the career fair.
Without much luck in the first couple hours of his outreach mission, Tenoch eventually got the Latinx Cultural Association’s social media manager Sebastian Deibert to start a petition standing against the federal immigration agency at Cal Poly for students to sign and share with others.
Andrea Canche, a business sophomore and event planner for the cultural association, said the petition received over 1,500 signatures as of Friday, Oct. 17. Canche reached out to University President Jeffrey Armstrong to discuss student concerns over the agency’s inclusion at the career fair.
“I want to acknowledge receipt of your note and let you know that I hear you,” Armstrong wrote to Canche in an email response obtained by Mustang News. “I care about all our students and place safety first. I am aware of the concerns and the multiple emails.”
After the petition began circulating around campus, Tenoch said the Students for Justice in Palestine club helped take the lead on initiating plans for organizing and protesting.
Jamaly, an ethnic studies senior, was not surprised to hear of Customs and Border Protection coming to campus, considering previous controversies the university had at other career fairs over its employers like Lockheed Martin, a defense company who has supplied Israel with weapons during the war on Gaza.
Tenoch believed the addition of the federal immigration agency felt “counter intuitive” and “hypocritical” to Cal Poly’s mission of becoming an HSI and supporting a diverse student body, and criticized the university for it.
“You can’t claim us for diversity points at one point, and you can’t do all this performative stuff,” Tenoch said. “And then when it actually comes down to it, you’re not there for us.”
For Mariana Perez, a comparative ethnic studies senior and co-president of Comparative Ethnic Studies Student Association, she thinks the university considers her another “HSI percentage” to fill, which she said taints the relationship between Cal Poly and its students of color.
“It’s, like, great to recognize the privilege of being here and in this institution and receiving an education, but it’s also so frustrating to be constantly fighting for your worth and for like to take up space here,” Perez said.
While Latino students are among the minority at Cal Poly in comparison to their white counterparts, Tenoch feels like some students of color become complacent when support is needed most.
“We don’t have access to legacies and the wealth that some of these other students do,” Tenoch said. “But I think we’ve grown too complacent.”
Jamaly would agree that many people aim to uphold the “status quo” at Cal Poly, including the administrative bodies on campus, which he said results in no change.
The Students for Justice in Palestine co-president also acknowledged that the club’s mission aligns with any other group at Cal Poly who do not agree with Customs and Border Protection on campus because they are all oppressed in one way or another.
“We’re all oppressed under the same kind of systems and institutions and nations and technology and everything, like it goes very deep,” Jamaly said.
Faculty responses to Customs and Border Protection on campus
As the co-chair of California Faculty Association’s Immigration Task Force at Cal Poly, Cameron Jones and four other faculty drafted an email asking Cal Poly administration to enact a list of several requests from the union in light of Customs and Border Protection attending the career fair.
In the email, faculty wanted the university to not allow Customs and Border Protection or ICE to recruit in the normal business of campus as “their current policies directly threaten members of our community.”
In addition the email also urged the university’s administration to update their information on rights and responses to federal immigration enforcement on campus, which took the form of an FAQ sheet in January this year.
Jones wished the university had been more “sensitive” to the current climate of immigration in the country, and in turn not overlooked the invitation of the federal immigration agency on campus considering how some in the community may feel about it.
The history lecturer also criticized Cal Poly’s career fairs for previous controversies that were never resolved.
“Cal Poly really hasn’t done anything to, you know, solve the problems created by the career fair,” Jones said.
He added that the problem mainly lies in the absence of any vetting process for potentially contentious employers attending the event.
Jared Van Ramshorst, a political science professor at Cal Poly, questioned the university’s reasoning for becoming an HSI despite the recent controversy.
“What does it mean then to become this HSI, this Hispanic serving institution that also simultaneously, in this fraught political moment, allows an organization like Customs and Border Protection to recruit on campus,” Van Ramshorst said.
Van Ramshorst believed there are also other immediate needs the community should take to support undocumented students, regardless of whether the federal immigration agency were to come to campus or not.
Nonetheless Van Ramshorst believes the agency’s presence at the career fair does not send the right message to students of color, considering some of the recent Supreme Court rulings in favor of racial profiling tactics used by federal immigration enforcement.
“If you even look like you might be Latino or brown or Hispanic or Mexican or whatever, based on the recent Supreme Court decision, it’s sending a message that you do not belong here on campus, or that you are not safe,” Van Ramshorst said.
