Strawser | Standing up to Trump on immigration is what justice demands

Published Feb. 3, 2025, 7:48 p.m., last updated Feb. 3, 2025, 7:49 p.m.

My father, a US veteran, is the person I thank for my Chinese and Mexican heritage. On his side of the family, I have relatives from a Texas border county that issued an emergency declaration in response to migrants’ impacts on public safety. My mother, who came to the US much younger than I am today, is who I thank for my Filipino heritage. To say immigration is personal to me would be an understatement.

I believe this makes me a reasonable person to discuss our nation’s need to secure its borders and give more people the opportunity to lead the better lives they deserve in this country. All of the pieces of this puzzle, from our foreign policy to state ballot measures, should be subject to reasonable conversation. However, the Stanford community must understand exactly how untrustworthy President Donald Trump’s administration is in facilitating this conversation. 

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has suspended 14-year-old limits on arresting suspected undocumented immigrants in “sensitive areas,” such as hospitals, schools, religious institutions and protests. This sledgehammer of a response has raised obvious and regional alarms, with fears of deportation worrying Bay Area families and rendering Central Valley farmworkers too afraid to come to work.

Trump’s demands for a five-fold increase in daily immigration arrests does not meaningfully address the real dangers of, say, our lax gun regulations practically giving Latin American gangs an “iron river” of firearms or our chronically underfunded immigration courts delaying the deportation of genuine criminals. With DHS putting more effort into detaining Native Americans and Puerto Ricans — all US citizens — its quotas amount to state-sanctioned racial profiling. 

Trump signed the Laken Riley Act into law and demanded that Guantánamo Bay be used to hold undocumented immigrants without trial. The Act requires the detention of undocumented immigrants based on mere accusations of criminal activity, adding another layer of inhumanity to the President’s calls to restore the war on terror’s signature torture center. It is evident that the administration is abandoning due process in truly horrifying ways. 

Our President declared that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and spread false blood libel about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio. Trump’s broader rhetorical playbook is rooted in the “ugly strain in American history” telling us that some among us — those that don’t look like us, those we’re told to view as savages — don’t belong here.

Trump has even fired over a dozen federal oversight authorities, barred his Department of Justice from future civil rights litigation and accepted $270 million in political donations from a Nazi-inspired billionaire. It must be said that he, in addition to treating our republic’s most sacred protections as obstacles to overcome, is intent on removing immigrants from our country. He has clearly ventured far beyond any reasonable balance between rights and security on the issue of immigration.

With the President violating legal protections, moral principles and historical lessons, Stanford must view his immigration agenda diligently. We must demand that the University devote every dollar possible to Know Your Rights workshops, legal defense funds and other resources as necessary. We must never surrender the information we have on our undocumented community members. We must tirelessly demonstrate to display our full love and solidarity for our undocumented peers, campus workers, etc. As a community, we would be leading by example for higher education at-large.

It is crucial for University President Jonathan Levin ’94 and Provost Jenny Martinez to say that Stanford will forever be a safe haven for its undocumented community members, wherein hatred will forever be condemned in all of its forms. Such a message would be the disavowal of Trump’s inherently exclusionary and blatantly unconstitutional excuse of an immigration agenda that the moment calls for. Amidst Stanford’s institutional neutrality policy, I can think of no dilemma more core to the University’s commitment to research and educational excellence than addressing harms that could put its very own students, hospital patients and campus staff in danger.

Stanford, as an institution, loves to uplift its marginalized community members during diversity photoshoots and establishing a greater number of feckless committees. However, political pressures and potential donor influence are no excuse to surrender our undocumented community members to the nation’s modern-day Schutzstaffel. For I am reminded of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was murdered for his convictions, said in urging his fellow Germans to resist the Hitler regime:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” 

Justice demands that we stand by the undocumented members of our community. History reminds us that we cannot afford to wait until DHS forces its way into Stanford Hospital, Memorial Church or even our own classrooms to speak up.

Sebastian Strawser ‘2(?) is an Opinions contributor. He also writes for Humor and The Grind. His interests include political philosophy, capybaras and Filipino food. Contact Sebastian at sstrawser 'at' stanforddaily.com.

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