Photo by Steven Ospina Delgado.
Last Thursday, SBU staff and students protested the increasing ICE raids across the country, including last month’s fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE officers. Protesters demanded SBU establish protections for international and immigrant students, and designate the university as a sanctuary campus.
The demands echo last year’s, following the revocation and subsequent reinstatement of 11 international students’ visas. More than 3,400 international students attend SBU, according to the New International Student Handbook.
They also demanded: SBU President Andrea Goldsmith send an email committing to protecting students and workers, and not cooperating with ICE; mandatory “know your rights” training for students, faculty and staff; access to confidential immigration legal services; and that community members be notified if their information is provided to ICE.
Goldsmith and Provost Carl Lejuez did not respond to a request for comment.
Demonstrators first gathered around the administration fountain before marching into the administration building. Organizers held signs that read: “Abolish ICE”; “Respect my existence or expect my resistance”; and “You can’t love the culture and not support the people.”
Inside the administration building, protesters handed out flowers and held a moment of silence for people affected by ICE raids, before staff and students spoke.
During his speech, Josh Dubnau, a professor in the anesthesiology department, said the administration pretended that the “simple” requests were “radical.”
“Today we’re calling on the administration to choose solidarity,” he said.
Daniel Greeson, an SBU graduate student who spoke at the protest, said that he believes calling out the university is the best method for garnering support from administration.
“Admin always says that the way to get them to respond to things is to politely sit down and … have respectful dialogue sitting at a table with them,” he said. “But they don’t actually move until we mobilize people and put some kind of collective pressure on them.”
Angela Jones, a professor in the women’s, gender and sexuality studies department echoed the same sentiment when she spoke at the protest.
“Major societal change [and] institutional shifts result from the people demanding it,” she said.
“What I’m hearing from students demands today is just a reasonable call to our institutional leaders to use all their institutional might to resist … and to stand in solidarity with their community against state-sponsored violence.”
Greeson added, “When they see the collective power that we have as students and employees of Stony Brook, they always respond more quickly. I am hopeful that we will see a response from admin to this rally.”
“Ultimately we outnumber them and we make the university run.”
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