What Would Happen if ICE Came to Campus
The passing of Executive Order 14148 by President Donald Trump repealed a Biden-era order that limited the use of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in “protected” areas such as schools, medical care facilities, and places of worship, including colleges like Reed. Because of the new order, concerns have been raised over the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement coming to Reed, considering rumors of ICE raids in the Portland area.
Reed’s website outlines its practice on working with law enforcement, including ICE. The website instructs students who encounter police officers to “[d]irect the officer to Community Safety at 28 West. You may also call Community Safety to inform them of the officer’s presence and ask them to meet them at your location to escort them to 28 West.” The website also tells students to say, “I do not consent to your presence, search, or questioning without a proper judicial warrant,” if speaking with an ICE agent. It also directs students to information on printing out red cards, which can help people assert their rights when dealing with immigration enforcement.
To find out more, the Quest spoke with Director of Community Safety Gary Granger, who elaborated on the college’s practices. To start, Granger made a distinction between policy and practice. “There's no Reed ‘Big P’ Policy, like in the Reed Handbook or in the world of Reed policy, that says we will and we won't do these and those things,” he said, but Community Safety does “have a practice, as an institution, to have control over our private property, to protect the privacy of our students and our employees and faculty.”
“We do not assist law enforcement in doing things that we are not required to do unless there is an exigent need to protect someone's life or property,” Granger explained. “If law enforcement folks show up and they have a legal document that requires a college to do something, [like if] it's a subpoena signed by a judge, or it's a court order, or it's an arrest warrant, or a search warrant, then we're obligated to comply.”
To answer the question of what Community Safety will do after law enforcement is sent to them, the website states that Community Safety “will not provide information, nor will they grant access to controlled spaces. They will positively identify whomever shows up and ask them what they are seeking. Unless they present a valid warrant or court order, Community Safety will say something like we ‘would prefer not to’ give any information,” except in the case of life-threatening emergencies, which the website noted would “not be the case for ICE agents.”
Even in the unlikely event ICE were to come to Community Safety with a search warrant, they would not be able to obtain information pertaining to student or employee immigration status. Granger explained how Reed does not “ask people’s immigration status,” and to his knowledge, does not “have a list anywhere of people who might or might not be in the country according to the legal guidelines.” All of Reed’s international students have visas, which are all “well-documented,” and there are “federal rules around their visa status that allow for information to be shared,” said Granger. The process of becoming a Reed employee and providing proof of the right to work, “doesn't tell us directly [an employee’s] immigration status. It tells us whether or not that they have a social security number and valid government-issued ID that we can use to substantiate their right to work,” Granger explained.
To give an example of how an interaction between law enforcement and Community Safety would go, Granger described how, if someone were to show up and say they were looking for a specific person, he would respond, “Well, I'm happy to pass your contact information along. Should we have someone by that name.’” If someone were to show up with a subpoena, he said, “typically, we would still call our attorney… we'd have an attorney say, ‘yep, that's the real thing. You need to do that,’ or ‘hold the phone, that's not legitimate.’”
Even then, said Granger, “if [ICE] actually has an arrest warrant for a person, I don't have to tell them where the person is, unless I was convinced that there was a safety risk to not cooperating,.” Since Reed is a private campus, law enforcement could not search campus for a person “unless they could prove that they knew the person was in a building and their warrant allowed them to force entry, which would be extraordinarily rare to have that happen,” explained Granger.
Speaking from experience, Granger said that “over the years, there have been a few times when different law enforcement agencies have showed up and said, ‘Hey, we're going to arrest this person if we can find them for alleged crime.’ And my response is the same, like, ‘well, give me that information, I can pass it along to the person potentially, …But no, you can't go looking for them. And no, I'm not going to escort you around campus and let you into places to do that.’”
Overall, Granger believes that the risk of ICE coming to campus is extremely low. “It's not zero,” Granger says, “But we don't have a large population of people under any circumstances that would likely be undocumented. There might be some domestic students, you know, who came with parents who were not here legally, might be undocumented. We wouldn't know.”
For students concerned about how to defend themselves legally, Granger recommends the upcoming talk “The Law and Your Ass” put on by alumni and criminal defense lawyer Bear Wilner-Nugent ’95. The talk is in Vollum Lecture Hall on Tuesday, March 4, at 5:30pm.