Findings and Policy recommendations

Selected Academic Publications from Project

Policy recommendations for college faculty, staff, and administrators

*Keep in mind that undocumented students are not a homogenous group and have diverse strengths, interests, and needs. Undocumented students are the best experts on what undocumented students need on your campus.

• • Faculty: Include supportive language in your syllabus specific to undocumented students, e.g.: "On classroom norms/community: Undocumented students have every right to safety as their documented counterparts." and "Excused absences include court hearings and immigration appointments. No documentation is needed to receive an excused absence."

  • Place UndocuAlly-type stickers or signs on your office door and have appropriate campus resources and contacts ready for any students who might disclose their immigration situation to you.

  • Consider that faculty/staff statements about sanctuary campuses that are written without meaningful engagement with directly affected immigrants can come off as performative. Worse, these statements can coexist with policies that do not sufficiently protect undocumented students and can help deflect scrutiny on all the ways a campus might be connected with immigration authorities (e.g. setting up ICE or Border Patrol internships for students in your criminal justice program).

  • International students on F1 visas face considerable challenges, yet their situations are more often than not very different from undocumented students. It is not helpful to conflate international and undocumented student populations.

  • Believe students when they describe discriminatory, racist, and violent experiences on campus, including from faculty, staff, and other students.

  • Provide privacy for students at points of conduct with college bureaucracy where they might need/want to reveal their status, such as at the bursar’s office. Train front-facing staff to ensure a respectful and private interaction.

  • Data security is paramount. Are you keeping lists of undocumented students on your work or home computer so you can email students about new scholarship opportunities or a legal clinic? Such lists could endanger students. If you must keep them, organize a data security training and learn about encrypted data systems.

  • Scholarships for undocumented students that have built-in expectations for the recipients to serve as the public face of undocumented students on campus or engage in activism and advocacy work violate students’ freedom to decide whether or how much to be public about their status, which is an incredibly high-stakes decision that is difficult to reverse.

  • Many undocumented college students do not disclose their status on campus. Do not assume that you know the population of undocumented students on your campus, nor that you fully understand their characteristics, such as countries of origin, access to DACA, or legal pathways to status adjustment.

  • Do you teach or advise students about careers? Make sure that you know your state’s regulations for professions and licenses. Do they require legal permanent residency status or US citizenship? Do your criminal justice majors know that most law enforcement jobs require citizenship?

  • Don’t assume that all undocumented college students have DACA. When planning events, do not use the term “DACA student”, as it excludes undocumented students who do not have DACA.

  • Do not use the term “Dreamer student”. Not all undocumented students identify as a Dreamers or agree with the political framing.

  • Some college staff and faculty emphasize and celebrate undocumented student activism in ways that can feel coercive to students who seek support and approval of their mentors on campus but are still figuring out whether or how much to be public about being undocumented in a violently uncertain context.

  • Investigate the assumptions about the composition of undocumented population on your campus built into the support systems. Do your events presume a particular demographic in the way you design flyers and who you invite?

  • Work to get police off your campus. Campus police criminalize students, which places those who are undocumented and those who are legal permanent residents in danger of detention and deportation. Evaluate campus policies around admission to campus grounds. If IDs are required to enter campus, what policies are in place to enable access for students who lost or forgot their ID and do not have a state-issued ID? Allow students to show their course schedules or verify their enrollment in other ways.

  • Make space to listen to undocumented students you work with. Sometimes well-meaning insistence on solutions can become overwhelming for youth who seek recognition of the profound difficulty and violence of being made undocumented in the US.

Recommended reading: We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States, edited by Leisy Abrego and Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales. Duke University Press.