Why Sanctuary Campus Now?

We propose a Sanctuary Campus Network as a means to build local and regional affinity groups, pool our efforts, communicate about our victories and setbacks, and care for one another.

Sanctuary is a love-based movement that emerged to give harbor to people displaced by US-supported civil wars in Central America in the 1980s. The movement evolved as the Bush II and Obama administrations ramped up deportations and migrant justice advocates protected people at risk of removal and worked to cut ties between local law enforcement and the federal deportation apparatus. It resurged with the first Trump administration, which relentlessly targeted migrants through its border and interior enforcement policies, as seen in the so-called Muslim Ban and the zero tolerance border policy that led to thousands of family separations at the southern border.

In 2016 and 2017, students, faculty, and workers pushed universities across the nation to declare their campuses as sanctuaries. Commitments included protecting undocumented students by refusing to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials onto campus, refusing to allow campus police to enforce immigration law, and refusing to share student data with ICE.

Today, a worse storm is coming. The 2024 Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are coming for all of us. Their ultimate goal is to destroy democratic institutions and safeguards in order to consolidate power into the presidency. They identify universities as foci of progressive ideas and values and, therefore, as primary targets for their campaigns to destroy the remaining shreds of democracy. They are manufacturing consent for this consolidation of autocratic power by targeting vulnerable communities: migrants, queer and trans people, the unhoused, women and pregnant people, Arabs and Muslims, environmentalists, earth and land defenders, Indigenous nations, people of color, scientists and health practitioners, and more. It is imperative to organize our campuses against the coming assaults.

Today, We Aim To:

Resist: immigration enforcement and ICE presence on campus

Build: networks of care and direct action

Fight: for a democratic, decolonized university that serves the people, not oppressive systems

Dismantle: structures of policing and surveillance within academic institution

We propose that particular policies adopted by the Sanctuary Campus Network be grounded by a set of three core commitments:

Sanctuary for All

Sanctuary does not distinguish between the deserving and undeserving. All who are defined as outsiders to the MAGA state are targets: women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people, Arab and Muslim folks, migrants, land defenders, and more. None of us are safe from Project 2025. We must love and protect one another.

Abolitionist Sanctuary

Sanctuary cannot condone some cages while condemning others. We must organize to dismantle the conditions that foster prisons, concentration camps, police departments, and imperial military forces, and to build a world in which such repressive institutions are neither necessary nor tolerated. Nation-state borders are a modern invention inextricably tied to the colonialist and capitalist systems that are destroying the planet. They are an inherent violation of the human right to mobility. Borders must be abolished.

Beyond Academic Freedom: A Democratic, Decolonized University

The university is a prime target in the efforts to destroy democracy, starting with progressive movements. While academic freedom is essential, to defend intellectual inquiry, free speech, and the university as an institution for critical thought, we need to build a movement for a thorough democratization and decolonization of the university. Now is a moment when we can mobilize a mass movement that connects multiple, intersecting facets of the shared struggle.