We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest

Roughly eleven million people live in the United States without legal status, including hundreds of thousands of our students, faculty, and staff, who now live under tremendous anxiety about being deported. Previously, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) followed policy stating that immigration officers should avoid areas such as college campuses, schools, and hospitals “to the fullest extent possible,” but the new Trump administration recently rescinded this protection. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provided work authorization and temporary protection from deportation. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal recently declared DACA illegal, but limited its ruling to Texas and allowed current DACA recipients, even in Texas, to renew DACA while the case is on appeal, pending further rulings by itself or the Supreme Court. The Biden administration reliably defended DACA in the courts, but the actions of the Trump administration, which campaigned on a virulently anti-immigrant platform, are not yet clear. Many undocumented college students do not have DACA status due to the first Trump administration’s rejection of DACA applications. Student activists have called on state legislatures to pass proposed legislation to allow students equal access to employment in public universities, regardless of immigration status, but these efforts have not yet succeeded.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protects from deportation roughly one million US residents who face life-threatening conditions such as armed conflicts or natural disasters in their home countries. In 2017, the first Trump administration terminated TPS for people from Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, El Salvador, Nepal, and Honduras, but this termination was stopped by the courts and TPS was again extended by the Biden administration. On January 29, 2025, the Trump administration revoked TPS status for people from Venezuela, placing 600,000 people at risk for deportation. On February 20, 2025, it revoked TPS status for people from Haiti, placing 500,000 more people at risk.

Many of our students have legal status but are in “mixed families” with some family members without legal status. An estimated 22 million people in the US live in mixed-status households. A family member being deported is a major calamity that threatens a student’s financial resources and mental well-being, and of course their ability to complete their education. Also, people detained for immigration violations are not entitled to free legal representation, because these are civil, not criminal, proceedings.

Transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been subject to relentless legislative attacks by the Republican Party. In 2024 alone, 672 anti-trans bills were considered by state legislatures in 43 states, with 50 of these bills passing in 17 states. In an executive order, the Trump administration directed federal government forms and documents to be limited to male and female, undoing the Biden administration’s inclusion of designations for people who identify as non-binary, intersex, or gender non-conforming. Anthony G. Brown, Attorney General of Maryland, stated: “Make no mistake: this Executive Order threatens people’s lives.” As of August 2024, roughly 40 percent of the more than 300,000 trans youth in the US live in the 26 states that have banned gender-affirming care. After the Trump administration’s January 28, 2025 executive order attempting to stop federal funding nationwide for gender-affirming care, hospitals in New York, Virginia, Colorado, and Washington DC stopped treatments and cancelled appointments for children and adults younger than 19. In a 2024 survey, 46 percent of transgender and nonbinary young people, and 39 percent of LGBTQ+ young people generally, seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous year. Among transgender and nonbinary young people, 45 percent reported that they or their family had considered moving to a different state because of LGBTQ+ -related politics and laws. On February 13, 2025, US District Judge Brendan A. Hurson granted a restraining order to block the executive order, stating: “The Court cannot fathom discrimination more direct than the plain pronouncement of a policy resting on the premise that the group to which the policy is directed does not exist.”

Especially for many trans and gender-nonconforming people, institutions of higher education are places where they can build and express their own identity away from the hostility of their earlier environments. It is a tremendous blow when this refuge is also made hostile by government action. Some of these state laws have the specific goal of making colleges and universities unwelcoming to trans and nonbinary students. For example, Ohio’s SB 104 prohibits all institutions of higher education in the state from allowing students to use a restroom consistent with their gender identity if their gender identity differs from what Ohio calls their “biological sex,” which is either male or female. Trans or gender-nonconforming students can thus only use single-occupancy bathrooms. Idaho’s House Bill 538, using the justification of “free speech,” allows public university employees to misgender a student with impunity (that is, call a student with a name they do not wish and refer to a student with pronouns they do not wish), which can endanger the student’s physical safety. No one wants to study, live, or work in an environment that is hostile to their very existence. On February 8, 2025, the Department of Education announced to its employees that it would be ending all programs and policies supporting transgender students.

Exacerbating these attacks, the Trump administration is trying to end Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives throughout society. Since 2023, Republican legislators have introduced 86 anti-DEI bills in 28 states, and 14 have become law. More than two hundred public colleges and universities in 32 states have dismantled DEI offices and activities. For example, the University of Alabama in August 2024 closed the offices of the Black Student Union and permanently closed the Safe Zone, the center for LGBTQ+ students. Republicans have introduced a bill to end all federal funding for colleges and universities that continue with DEI offices or policies. This would remove a layer of institutional protection and advocacy for trans and nonbinary people, and for all LGBTQ+ people, people of color, people with disabilities, and women. On January 23, 2025, Rutgers University canceled a conference organized by the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions because of Trump’s recent executive orders. Fearing for their careers, faculty have already been forced to drop or modify courses and lectures to comply with anti-DEI state legislation, of course a violation of their academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has found over one hundred bills in state legislatures that are academic “gag orders” restricting what colleges and universities can teach. In February 2025, the US Naval Academy cancelled classes such as “Gender Matters: the Sociology of Gender” and removed subject matter on topics related to discrimination and inequality.

In response to the Department of Education’s threat on February 14, 2025 to withhold federal funding from colleges and universities that do not eliminate diversity-oriented initiatives, on February 20, 2025, twenty-four US constitutional law professors released a memo making clear that “DEI Programs Are Lawful Under Federal Civil Rights Laws and Supreme Court Precedent.”

Student protests have been essential to establishing and protecting democracy in countries throughout the world. In the United States, student protests helped end racial segregation, helped end the Vietnam War, helped end apartheid by calling for divestment from South Africa, and helped establish Chicana/o Studies departments in universities. 

The ability to protest nonviolently is essential to our democracy and a basic human right that must be respected and protected. Criminalizing student and faculty protests on campuses undermines this democratic safeguard and violates academic freedom. In the spring of 2024, however, colleges and universities throughout the United States violently arrested, in some cases firing weapons illegally, more than three thousand peaceful student protesters calling for an end of Israel’s war in Gaza, divestment from companies profiting from the war, and holding the US accountable for its support of the war. For example, on April 18, 2024, more than 108 students at Columbia University engaged in peaceful protest were arrested, suspended from their courses, and evicted from university housing.  As another example, on April 30, 2024 at UCLA, violent outside agitators attacked students at the Palestine Solidarity Encampment for several hours, sending at least twenty-five people to emergency rooms, while law enforcement did nothing; the next day law enforcement conducted mass arrests, sending another fifteen students to emergency rooms with severe puncture wounds. Many colleges and universities have since created draconian policies to restrict and punish campus protests. The Trump administration has recently targeted students, faculty, and staff who protested against Israel’s war in Gaza. University of California student groups called this a “direct assault on free speech rights. . . . This inaccurate conflation of pro-Palestine advocacy with antisemitism sets a scary precedent of censorship for the student community where only certain students are able to participate in free speech.”

The leaders of colleges and universities who forcibly repressed peaceful student protesters violated our shared values of open discourse and placed student safety in jeopardy. Instead of defending the core values of academia, they thoroughly capitulated to Republican fear-mongering, notably from a Republican-led congressional committee. This was already distressing but is ominous given the present Trump administration. Mass protests are the most effective way to defend democracy from autocrats trying to seize power, and mass protests often start with students. Repressing student protests removes one of our most powerful and historically reliable means for defending democracy.

University leaders have also taken extraordinary and unusual measures to stop campus labor unions from exercising their legal right to strike. For example, in May 2024, UAW 4811, the union of academic student employees, postdocs, and researchers at the University of California (UC), went on strike because their members’ free speech rights and personal safety were jeopardized by the university’s mass arrests in April. UC tried to stop the strike with a restraining order but the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), the state agency charged with ruling on collective bargaining issues with state employees, ruled against them twice. UC then went to the Orange County Superior Court, “simply because they did not like the outcome at PERB,” which granted a temporary restraining order without ruling on the main question of whether the strike was legal. UC thus used the same “judge-shopping” technique used by anti-abortion activists. Major strikes led by labor unions have in many countries been essential for defending democracy, and we cannot let our universities diminish union power right when we need it.

The history of US higher education is in large degree a history of immigration, with several decades of scientists and intellectuals in all fields escaping political persecution, arriving here as refugees, and enriching our lives immeasurably. US higher education accounted for $50 billion as an export in 2023, comparable to exports of semiconductors ($57 billion) and passenger cars ($62 billion). What attracts students from all over the world to US higher education, in addition to its overall excellence, is the freedom to discuss and inquire, so necessary for learning and research, and the freedom from discrimination and political persecution. 

However, the Republican party is now openly persecuting immigrants, including international faculty, staff, and students, simply for having opinions. In its January 20, 2025 executive order, the Trump administration stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.” Persecuting people for expressing, or even just having, attitudes is the essence of a totalitarian state. The Council on American-Islamic Relations stated that the order “threatens an unprecedented crackdown on free speech and legal immigration based on vague, subjective and unenforceable criteria” and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee stated that the order allows “using ideology as a basis for removal.” In its January 29, 2025 executive order, the Trump administration announced its intention to deport international students who participated in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, despite the fact that the First Amendment guarantees free speech regardless of immigration status. 

In May 2023, the Florida legislature passed a law prohibiting public colleges and universities in Florida from hiring researchers, including graduate students, from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria, without the permission of the state Board of Governors, a group with seventeen members, of whom fourteen are appointed by the governor. This created confusion and panic in graduate student recruiting efforts, especially in STEM fields. In response, roughly four hundred faculty at the University of Florida signed an open letter calling for “continu[ing] hiring international students, postdocs, and visiting scholars with funding, regardless of their country of origin.” One faculty signatory wrote, “National origin shouldn’t limit the opportunities or potential contributions of graduate students—at least not in America” and another wrote, “I feel disappointed and ashamed.” In September 2023, the Florida Board of Governors stated that “Collaborating with a foreign principal on a research project” or “Sharing data with a foreign principal” from one of these seven countries required its approval, a violation of faculty and staff free speech rights.

Colleges and universities are health care providers for millions of young people, who are in need of reproductive health care. In states where Republicans have made abortion illegal, students in particular often lack the resources to travel to other states and are in great need of help. Even in states where abortion rights still exist, many colleges and universities are reluctant to provide abortion services. A 2022 survey found that only fifteen out of 178 student health centers surveyed in the US provided medication abortion services, and only five provided surgical abortion services. As late as spring 2024, Barnard College in New York City was one of the first private colleges in the nation to provide medication abortion on campus. Recent legislation requires University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) campus clinics to provide medication abortion, but until recent scrutiny, almost half of CSU clinics did not provide any information about medication abortion on their websites. Not having access to a safe abortion can be devastating. 

More than half of all academic research funding in the US comes from the federal government, and together National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants comprise roughly two-thirds of this federal funding. On February 2, 2025, NSF employees were informed of Trump administration plans to cut the NSF budget by two-thirds and lay off half its staff. In February 2025, the US Department of Education cancelled over $1 billion in research grants and contracts. On February 14, 2025, NIH and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) sent termination letters to over 2,000 employees.

On February 7, 2025, NIH announced its plan to slash support for indirect costs in the grants that it awards to researchers. Indirect costs are what colleges and universities pay to maintain the infrastructure (including buildings, support staff, and utilities) required for doing research, and a researcher who receives a federal grant receives support for these indirect costs in addition to the direct costs of doing research, such as research assistant salaries. These NIH cuts amount to a crippling reduction in federal support for colleges and university budgets, with many large institutions losing over $100 million per year. The editor-in-chief of Science writes: “The scientific community must unite in speaking out against this betrayal of a partnership that has enabled American innovation and progress. . . . All disciplines will be affected by these cuts, not just science. This is a moment to unite.”

Especially alarming is the fact that the Trump administration, by withholding NIH and NSF funding, is trying to compel colleges and universities to submit to its political objectives. On January 23, 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed all of its web pages recommending that clinical trials for drugs include experimental subjects from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. Testing drugs on experimental subjects who represent the diversity of the population of people who would be treated is necessary for scientific validity. Among research projects currently funded by the NIH, roughly sixteen hundred projects, totaling around $1 billion, include the word “gender” in their abstract. Four hundred and twelve grants, totaling $235 million, include the words “transgender,” “gender minority,” or “nonbinary.” Scientists working in these areas fear that this funding will be arbitrarily eliminated by Trump’s recent executive order to “ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.” NSF grants which include words such as “barrier,” “biases,” “disability,” “trauma,” “race,” and “women,” are currently being flagged for possible termination. Applications for NIH predoctoral fellowship awards for minority students have been abruptly removed from consideration and grants for efforts to promote diversity have been abruptly terminated. CDC scientists who had submitted papers to scholarly journals were ordered to withdraw them so they could be checked if they conform to Trump administration dictates. As mentioned earlier, on February 14, 2025 the Department of Education threatened to withhold federal funding in an attempt to stop diversity-enhancing initiatives.

Trump’s nominee for NIH director is considering making NIH research funds to a university conditional on a political judgment. According to one observer, “It’s not clear why we’d roadblock the best chances of finding a cure for cystic fibrosis or cancer or Alzheimer’s by adding potentially political, nonresearch factors into medical-research grant decisions.” According to the former general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the threat of cuts to research funding “is particularly focused on the places that have been the center of resistance to Trump and what Trump stands for in the past, particularly large research institutions in blue states. . . . The point is to get these institutions to back down, back off, be quiet.”