During one of Ithaca College’s busiest weeks, the Student Governance Council (SGC) was able to pass a very important bill – despite the article that The Ithacan had posted about SGC not doing its job properly. SGC passed a bill on Monday, Dec. 5 that will allow Ithaca College to join many other colleges and universities across the nation and become a sanctuary campus.
When our campus was still mourning the political loss of the election, on Nov. 16 some students decided to go out and protest the ideas of immigration the president elect has expressed during his campaign. A small group of students huddled together outside of Campus Center at Free Speech Rock after they walked out of their classes and chanted, “Education, not deportation.” At the time, 80 other colleges and universities either declared that they would become a sanctuary campus in the next year or had demonstrations on the need to become one.
The idea behind the sanctuary campus is to be able to reject the president-elect’s idea of repealing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows more than 700,000 immigrant children — who met certain guidelines — to be welcomed into the US for two years under deferred action. In other words, immigrants who came to the US as children were allowed to stay for about two years without fear of being deported for lack of documentation. Colleges that request to be sanctuary campuses are requesting to this program.
On Dec. 5 Michele Hau, SGC Vice President of Academic Affairs, along with SGC President Marieme Foote, Meredith Husar, Chief-of-Staff, Danielle Weinstein, Vice President of Communications, Emily Honen, Senator for the School of Humanities and Sciences, Cat Proulx, Senator-at-Large and TJ Horgan, Class of 2019 Senator all sponsored the bill.
With this bill, Ithaca will be joining colleges such as University of Pennsylvania, Santa Fe Community College, Connecticut College and Swarthmore College on the Wikipedia page list of sanctuary colleges. Also listed are the colleges and universities that had protests and demonstrations in order to become sanctuary colleges.
Ithaca’s bill suggests that the college will not help deport any of its students, faculty or staff due to their citizenship; public safety will not profile anyone they believe to not be documented; the community will create a list of services and volunteers to the students who share anxieties about their immigration and citizenship; the college will continue to be a nondiscriminatory campus, meaning no matter the citizenship of the student, they will be legally protected in the same way as any other student; and the college will continue the DACA program.
SGC may not have passed many bills this past semester, but that is because there were many issues to be looked at both on campus and nationally – it must be hard to be a part of an organization that requires such a big time commitment and make it to all of your classes on time with your homework assignments ready. But hey, SGC was still able to pass possibly the most important bill this school year may ever see.