More than 100 students marched across the Florida Atlantic University campus in Boca Raton on Friday to protest campus police collaborating with federal immigration authorities.
The student protestors, waving signs and chanting, demanded the FAU administration end the 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that the university announced in July.
Chants included “I-C-E, we don’t want your company!” and “President, not politician!" The latter takes aim at the university’s president, Adam Hasner, whose previous work as a Republican statehouse member and executive with Boca Raton-based GEO Group sparked protests earlier this year.
The “Task Force Model” of 287(g) between the FAU Police Department and ICE allows trained campus officers to enforce immigration laws during routine police encounters.
Angelíc Diaz, a senior who is double-majoring in neuroscience and biology, attended the protest. She called the agreement disheartening.
“Especially since FAU prides itself on its diversity and its international students, it just feels like we’ve completely lost what we stand for,” Diaz said.
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Amid light rain on Friday afternoon, the student protestors marched through campus and rallied in front of a school administrative building. Dozens of campus police officers, sheriff’s deputies and Florida wildlife officers monitored the protests.
“We’re surrounded by cops,” Nicholas Ostheimer, an FAU student and the protest’s organizer asked the crowd: “Do you fear for your safety?” They shouted back “No!”
Some counter protestors from the university chapter of Turning Point USA, a young conservatives group, attended and brought their own pro-ICE signs.
But the group was dwarfed in size by the anti-ICE student protestors.
Karen Leader, an associate professor of art history at FAU, fired up protestors during a speech. She recalled a student-led effort more than a decade ago to stop the administration from renaming the university stadium after GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison contractors.
We’re “even more outraged now that they have dropped the GEO Group right back into the middle of this institution,” Leader said, to boos. GEO Group runs the nearby Broward Transitional Center, an immigration detention center that contracts with ICE. The facility has been criticized for mistreatment of detainees.
“The university is following Governor Ron DeSantis’ law enforcement directive on Feb. 19, which requires all state law enforcement organizations in Florida to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” a university spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
“This includes FAUPD and all other state university police departments,” the spokesperson concluded.
