Students from college campuses across the nation planned to walk out of class on Wednesday to persuade their schools to become sanctuary campuses that protect undocumented students from being subject to deportation.
The protests come only a week after the election of Donald Trump, who, throughout his campaign, said that the deportation of undocumented individuals would be a priority if he were to assume office.
According to CNN, the idea of a sanctuary campus stems from sanctuary cities, who have been known to fight back against federal immigration enforcement.
Students have created petitions asking their universities to support undocumented students, some asking their universities for specific guarantees like not releasing students’ immigration status or university police to not assist the federal government in deportation.
According to The Huffington Post, Movimiento Cosecho, a recently formed immigrant rights group, was the group who coordinated Wednesday’s walk outs. Thaís Marques, a political science graduate student at Rutgers University – Newark, said that they want college campuses to adopt sanctuary campus policies.
“It’s [also] to show this country that young people are resisting against Donald Trump’s hatred and racism and xenophobia,” Marques told HuffPost.
Movimiento Cosecho was aware of at least 54 scheduled protests on Wednesday, including protests at NYU and Harvard, HuffPost reports.
However, the questions remains of whether universities have the authority to adopt such policies, but it could have a symbolic impact that universities are promoting inclusivity and promote education regardless of citizenship status.
“We’re already seeing that immigrant students aren’t exactly in a safe place on campus, so it really is the responsibility of the university to do something about that,” Marques said. “Young people are going to lead the way to create real structural changes so that policies created by Donald Trump won’t have an effect on the most vulnerable people.”