Silence Won’t Shield Harvard From ICE

Federal agents are lying their way onto Columbia’s campus, and yet Harvard continues to leave its community exposed.

At 6 a.m. on February 26th, five plainclothes immigration agents entered a Columbia University-owned apartment building without a judicial warrant, misrepresenting themselves as police officers searching for a missing child to the building superintendent. The agents then entered Ellie Aghayeva’s apartment with the same story and arrested her. Aghayeva is a student at Columbia’s School of General Studies and entered the United States around 2016.

The shocking details of her arrest — done on private university property, without a judicial warrant, and under false pretenses — demonstrate the severity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusions into university communities. ICE misrepresented its intentions and background, bypassing norms of due process to enter the apartment building. If federal agents are willing to lie their way through Morningside Heights, there is no reason to believe Cambridge is safe either.

As the threat of illegal federal immigration overreach grows more aggressive, the University must take concrete steps to protect its students and staff.

Harvard should already know how to respond. When tragedy struck at Brown University, Harvard acted swiftly to increase campus security, requiring ID checkpoints at more campus buildings and increasing security presence. We appreciated Harvard’s speed and decisiveness in addressing that crisis.

By contrast, the University has not shown the same urgency in treating what is a larger and more bellicose threat — immigration enforcement.

For example, Harvard has neglected to distribute easily accessible information to prepare affiliates for potential encounters with federal agents. Since the temporary revocation of Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification last year, there has been no comprehensive, campus-wide guidance on what to do if ICE appears at a University building.

One might contest that silence on Harvard’s part helps to keep the University neutral and off the mind of the Trump administration. But the events at Columbia suggest the opposite: After bending over backwards to satisfy the Trump administration, the school saw its student practically kidnapped, apparently remedied only by one charismatic mayor. And Harvard, mind you, has already taken a stance.

Failing to prepare and disseminate detailed safety materials does nothing to keep us neutral — it’s merely negligent.

Ideally, University communication should establish clear policy on how the University will respond to immigration enforcement. That can include indicating who is responsible for verifying warrants, what office should be contacted when federal agents are on campus, and what exactly should affiliates do and not do during an encounter.

Clear communication should dovetail with safety infrastructure, whether by strengthening control at campus throughpoints, keeping staffed rapid-response immigration hotlines, preparing workers, and coordinating protocols with nearby institutions.

Nevertheless, the administration actively seeks out ways to hurt institutions like Harvard. The situation is likely to deteriorate further as Trump’s term wears on, beyond the University’s ability to address the problem directly. Increased security measures can of course alleviate certain risks, but their effectiveness remains limited when federal agents display as blatant a disregard for legal and moral norms as they did last Thursday.

Underlying that dilemma is a deeper tension between the University's capacities and principles: At what point does compliance with corrupt applications of the law become complicity?

It is easy to glide past the concern now, when the Trump administration still resorts to means that bump up against the judiciary — but it is not far-fetched to imagine an authoritarian government cementing its control over the law, if not simply ignoring the law entirely.

But short of that quandary, Harvard has already put up significant resistance to the Trump administration that it can expand upon. From refusing to yield sensitive admissions data to the Department of Justice to fighting in court over federal funding, the University administration has laid the groundwork for a commitment to meaningful defiance. It is time to take the next step on immigration.

Harvard must ensure that if ICE comes here, it finds a campus that is ready — legally, physically, and morally — to protect its own.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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