AAUP Presents

Organizing Lessons from Resisting ICE on Campus

• Vineeta Singh

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On today’s episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, we’re talking about students, labor, migration, and what happens at the intersection of all those categories. We talk about how and why higher education workers must resist the rising tide of fascism on and off campus, and get organizing lessons from the front lines. 

Our guests today are: 

A. Naomi Paik, the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020) and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (2016). She is a part of the Migration Scholars Collaborative and a founding member of the Sanctuary Campus Network and Sanctuary for All UIC.

Abbie Boggs, who teaches in the department of sociology, college of education studies, and program in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University. Her first book, Degrees of Empire: Noncitizen Students and the Making of US Higher Education, is forthcoming this year from Fordham University Press. 

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández holds the Gregory Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at Ohio State University College of Law. His most recent book is “Welcome the Wretched” and he publishes Immigration Law Unhinged, a free weekly newsletter on Substack.

William I. Robinson, distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  His latest book is Epochal Crisis:  The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (2025) 


Sources mentioned in the podcast



Helpful Resources for Deeper Dives


Naomi Paik (00:00)
as long as the state gets to decide who gets to be a good immigrant, like the Harvard student or the Columbia student, right? Versus the bad immigrant, the undocumented.

laborer in a field or a construction site or whatever, ⁓ doing housework. You know, as long as we let the state make these determinations, everyone is at risk.

Vineeta Singh (00:22)
Welcome to another episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a special series of AAUP Presents produced in collaboration with the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. I'm Center Fellow, Vineeta Singh. Today's episode comes out of two questions, two questions that feel really urgent right now.

First, how do we make universities centers of resistance to ice?

Second, and I think this is a question that I've asked in every episode, how do we understand this specific moment in time, not just as some kind of aberration that we can attribute to the Trump regime, but as a part of a longer historical trajectory and political landscape? So in this case,

how do we understand the current moment of immigration enforcement in the United States as part of a longer history of state-sponsored racialized terror? We were able to gather some amazing scholars and activists to talk to us about these questions. You'll hear from them in a moment. The conversation will begin with more of a historical framing.

you'll hear about the transnational terror against migrant labor, the binary between good immigrant and bad immigrant in the United States, and how that binary has collapsed right before our eyes.

Around the halfway point, our conversation pivots towards specific organizing lessons. These are amazing and make this episode an incredible resource that I know I will keep coming back to year after year. You'll hear from me again at the end of the conversation when I recap some of those lessons for you.

Right now, I'm going to turn it over to our speakers. They'll introduce themselves and how their work intersects with these questions.

Abbie Boggs (02:05)
I'm Abbie Boggs. I teach in sociology, feminist and gender studies and the College of Education at Wesleyan University. And I've been working and thinking about the category or kind of figure of the non-citizen student for a long time. my first book is finally coming out this year called Degrees of Empire, Non-Citizen Students and the Making of U.S. Higher Education. I also write about kind of abolitionist approaches to the university with a bunch of comrades. So I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

César C. García Hernández (02:35)
I'm Cesar Cuatomo Garcia Hernandez, a law professor at Ohio State University where I hold the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. My research is focused on immigration law and policy and my most recent book is titled Welcome the Wretched in Defense of the Criminal Alien.

William Robinson (02:40)
you

Naomi Paik(02:52)
Hi, I'm Naomi Paik. I am the author of Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary, which is about abolitionist of sanctuary. And I also wrote a book called Rightlessness, which is about US prison camps from World War II to the present. I am a founding member of the Sanctuary Campus Network, which is a national network that tries to facilitate sanctuary campus organizing across the nation.

César C. García Hernández (03:06)
Hmm.

Naomi Paik (03:15)
And I'm also a founding member of Sanctuary for All UIC, which is our local ⁓ group that has been mobilizing for community defense and safety at the University of Illinois Chicago.

William Robinson (03:25)
Well, I'm William Robinson. I'm a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. And I've been working the issue of immigrant justice, both politically and academically for the last 20 years. And in 2009, AAUP defended my academic freedom when I was actually in a serious attack because of an issue you with Palestine and with immigrants. The two had been combined and AAUP.

came to my defense and here I am.

Vineeta Singh (03:53)
Thank you all for being here today. I'd love for us to start with a little bit of historical context. What do we need to know in order to understand what's happening with immigration enforcement in the United States today?

William Robinson (04:09)
you know, what we've seen in the last few decades is the expansion in the United States and really worldwide of this system of transnational migrant labor supply. And so we have this new axis of inequality worldwide and most intense in here in the United States, inequality between citizen workers and immigrant workers.

transnational migrant workers, since they're not citizens, don't have labor rights, don't have political rights, don't vote, can't defend their civil rights. And so that's the ideal labor force right now for this capitalist system in the United States over the last 40 years or so. You have a segment of the workers that are super exploited and super controlled. ⁓ And in order to keep this segment super exploited and super controlled, you have to permanently persecute them. So we have this war against immigrants going on.

for several decades now, certainly since the 1980s, since this system was put into place Now that war is intensifying under Trump, but Trump is really a qualitative intensification of what's been going on for the last 40 years or so.

Abbie Boggs (05:06)
Yeah, but students have kind of always functioned differently there, right? So students have not been, for the most part, the people being persecuted, but rather those who have been seen as like the exceptional inclusion, who are the good immigrants, who are also super trackable because they're both captured within the university kind of monitoring system. And that system itself is produced by and kind of under threat of the federal government. And that's been the case.

since at least 1952, but really back to 1921 and going further back from there too, where the kind non-citizen student, or especially the non-white non-citizen student has been included in ways that go against kind of the white supremacist logics of the state, but only in these highly conditional ways that require their surveillance. And in some ways actually set a kind of example of how non-citizen workers can more broadly be surveilled and managed.

much as you were saying, William, to the benefit of kind of a capitalist system. But the university, functions in a particular way within that process.

Vineeta Singh (06:07)
Abby, you mentioned 1952 as an important day. Can you say a little bit more about what happens then?

Abbie Boggs (06:12)
So 1952 is the McCarran-Walter Act, which basically lays a foundation for our current immigration policy. It's also deeply steeped in racism, xenophobia, misogyny, all the kind of great hits of the US immigration policy. But it also establishes formally the F1 student visa, along with the H visas for workers. And they're kind of set against each other as if the student is not also a worker, ⁓ which is also actually back to the history of Chinese students in the late 19th century who were also definitionally non-labor, even though I think we can all talk some about how the position of student is always worker, right? The work of study, the work of labor on campuses, both formally paid and unpaid. yeah, thinking about 52 is really important. It's also where we see the kind of carve-outs that are being used currently to persecute students. So the Mahmoud Khalil case hinges on an aspect of the 1952 Baccarin-Walter Act, which... think we can talk about more later if that's helpful.

Naomi Paik (07:10)
I can riff a little bit off of what William was saying about the transnational immigrant labor supply. And I would say I fully wholeheartedly agree that this system has become even more intensified over the last 40 years, i.e. the era of neoliberalism. And I think you're also kind of referencing the IRC or the Immigrant Reform and Control Act, which gave, ⁓ it's known for giving amnesty.

not really amnesty, but a pathway to citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants at the time. But what it also did was it really bolstered and fueled border enforcement, as well as interior enforcement

work authorization requirements. And that lays the groundwork for workplace raids that we have seen

ever since.

But I would even go back further than the period of neoliberalism, which is certainly an escalation, but you really have to go back to the very foundations of the United States. And I think Abby was riffing on this ⁓ around the good, bad immigrant kind of distinction. I really track this back to the settler colonial foundations of the United States. I'm not the only one, obviously Kelly Lytle Hernandez is very pivotal to this conversation, but thinking about how the settler Colonial Foundations

of the United States really set the stage for migrant exclusion, right? And also migrant labor exploitation, right? So not only stolen labor from enslaved peoples, but also the hyper exploitable labor of people from elsewhere, right? People who will never be fully recognized as of the United States because of their racial and other kinds of differences that accumulate around their backgrounds and bodies.

And I also think that, we need to track this back to the origins of federal immigration exclusion with Chinese exclusion, right? Which was ⁓ racialized and gendered and classed from the beginning and was also about this kind of regulation of the immigrant labor supply, right? And then this is also where you see that original distinction between the good and the bad immigrant with the carve outs for students, diplomats and business people. Okay, so we also need to think about this whole thing. And I think this is what William was talking about. We have to think about this all under the aegis of racial capitalism. Like none of this makes sense without that kind of framework.

Abbie Boggs (09:33)
I would just jump in to go back to the kind of settler colonial foundations to add that it's not just that the US has founded on those logics, but the institutions that we now, many institutions we now recognize as some of the most prestigious and well-resourced institutions like Harvard, William & Mary, their initial

William Robinson (09:47)
you

Abbie Boggs (09:47)
charters were actually designed not for the education of only kind of what would be now considered white settlers, but also they require the education of indigenous peoples from the regions of which they were, where they were founded. So the Pamunkey people down in Virginia, what's now Virginia.

and the Wampanoag people in Massachusetts, the first indigenous students who came to study at William and Mary though were actually prisoners of war that were taken by Virginians in order to satisfy the conditions of their charter. That was in 1702. So, I mean, it's both the foundations of the United States, but also the university in particular as a kind of a forge, or kind of part of the infrastructure of that settler colonial. and in an ongoing way,

César C. García Hernández (10:31)
The Trump administration excels in pushing trends to their breaking point. And what we've been seeing over the last 14 months or so when it comes to immigration law enforcement, and specifically the targeting of students and universities, is exactly that. The Trump administration did not pioneer the use of ⁓ heavy-handed aggressive policing tactics targeting migrants. did not pioneer the expansive growth of an immigration detention network. They did not pioneer the use of ⁓ heavy armaments and SWAT team style policing tactics. But what they have done is deployed those aggressively indiscriminately. and sensationally, to get the greatest attention, for their efforts. And we see that playing out on the streets of cities like Minneapolis, of course, and Chicago, but we also see the, the, the more sort of stealth of, aspect of that in the targeting of, student visas, through alterations to obscure databases that nonetheless have an immense impact on the quality of life. of students who come to the United States to study in any number of universities and colleges around the country. And that in fact, send a quite clear signal ⁓ that they are not welcome in the United States and that the federal government is going to use every tool at its disposal to make life in the United States, even as they try to get an education, make that life in the United States quite difficult, quite uncomfortable.


César C. García Hernández (12:05)
And fact, in some circumstances, so intolerable that folks simply choose to leave or make alternative plans about where it is that they're going to launch their educational careers.

William Robinson (12:19)
So I want to be a little provocative here, but just note a couple things. ⁓ Already 150 DACA students have been deported. So there's no longer the good student immigrant and the bad worker immigrant, right? Now it's also attacking the so-called good student immigrants. Secondly, we really need to bring Palestine into this discussion because when Trump launched this qualitatively new round of aggression, the first students they attacked

were Palestinian ⁓ Middle Eastern students that had been leading the struggle on campus against the genocide. That's two. The third thing is, ⁓ I know we're here to discuss the issue of immigrant repression on our campuses, but of course, and I know everyone agrees with this, we can't separate that from the larger war against immigrants, the larger situation. So having said that, I want to point out something that happened and it wasn't very well covered either on our campuses or in the...

larger media, but this is last July. So what happens in June, this so-called big, beautiful bill, this big, ugly bill is passed and that bill radically cuts Medicaid. It cuts food assistance. It cuts health and safety and other social programs. You know, it's seriously hitting a whole swathe of workers, including white workers, you know, ethnic, multiracial, all poor workers. And then, so then what happens? That's in June. In July, the

Growers, I'm here in Los Angeles, the growers complain that so many people are being deported that they don't have enough labor in the fields and fruits and vegetables are rotting. And so the secretary for agriculture, Brooke Rollins, she gives a public speech and she says, well, look, mass deportations are going to continue, absolutely no amnesty. However, since we've passed this bill, that's going to make a lot of people vulnerable and they're going to have to go out and look for work. And by the way, that bill said you can only get continue to get Medicaid if you get a job.

So she said, now, citizen workers, they can go and work in the fields. So what is that telling us? It's telling us that this war against immigrants is really the cutting edge of a larger work against the US working class. And at a time when the working class is experiencing this social and economic destabilization and downward mobility across the board, right?

So I think that's kind of a larger picture in which to frame what we're looking at.

Naomi Paik (14:36)
And just to pick up from there, I mean, this good, bad immigrant distinction or any of these binary distinctions that ends up attacking the negative side of the binary, we have to let those go. Like there is no, as long as the state gets to decide who gets to be a good immigrant, like the Harvard student or the Columbia student, right? Versus the bad immigrant, the undocumented.

laborer in a field or a construction site or whatever, ⁓ doing housework. You know, as long as we let the state make these determinations, everyone is at risk. And as William was saying, this is not going to stay confined to good versus bad immigrants, right? This is about good versus bad subjects of the United States.

Right. what we're seeing with the attack or the war on immigrants is a leading edge of this kind of fascist authoritarian state that we are seeing. And I really appreciate William, you highlighting Palestine and the pro-Palestine


Naomi Paik (15:36)
movement, because if we're thinking about what's happening in universities, we cannot avoid, again, this is not about Trump. We cannot avoid the United States.
long history of support for a genocidal settler colonial project elsewhere, right? And how that has really shaped the political conditions in the United States, right? So I think Palestine again, as once again, it is the laboratory for thinking through
how these distinctions between good and bad can shift very quickly, right? ⁓ Based on the state's needs, right? So even a Columbia student who is heterosexual, who is married, who is about to be a father, who is Ivy League educated, who has a green card, all of that. He is the quintessential good immigrant. None of those statuses protected him because he spoke out against genocide.

Abbie Boggs (16:31)
This also kind of plays into the long history of the university and international or non-citizen students because much of the regulation to kind of enhance oversight of students actually starts in the 1970s. Just after, well just as there's a rise in number of Iranian and other OPEC students, where other OPEC countries are coming into the United States and the rise of Islamophobia in the United States that is fueled by kind of Zionist beliefs that there's gonna be a bonding between Arab and Muslim students and Black people in the United States doing kind

of leftist work. So that feeds into Operation Boulder, which was under Nixon, which was surveillance of Arab and Muslim students, I believe, in the Chicago area. And then by the end of the 1970s, during the Iranian Revolution, and international students organizing in the US, that's what foments the move to want to have a computerized system for surveilling students. That doesn't actually take shape and get implemented until 2003 as opposed to 9-11 process, but the vision for that starts in the 1970s in response to Iranian students.

and also to Palestinian organizing in the US. So there's a trajectory there too.

I would also push us back to think about the university as part of that. The university is also a workspace, And international students who are working in labs are working under, especially in labs, are working under very exploitative conditions where their whole future in life depends on their advisor liking them. And it matters for the students, but it actually matters for the whole lab and the whole university then too, because that's the conditions of labor for the lab as a workspace.

William Robinson (17:36)
Exactly.

Abbie Boggs (17:59)
I there's, worry about exceptionalizing the non-citizen student or the international student, partly because what happens to them happens to everyone else too, right? It's often kind of canary in the coal mine situation where their conditional presence sets up labor conditions that affect everyone else as well. And so, yeah, I think the university has a space of work.

César C. García Hernández (18:17)
one thread that unites this conversation is of course that we're talking about targeting people who are not US citizens.

that takes on various flavors. It starts off as William, Naomi, and Abby have pointed out with targeting of students who are advocating on behalf of Palestinians.

César C. García Hernández (18:36)
or at least sort of just assumed by the Trump administration to be advocating on behalf of Palestinians

and quickly spreads beyond

in a way in which this notion of dangerousness evolves from being an ideological dangerousness, a politically motivated dangerousness to a dangerousness that's far broader than that. Recall the student at Ohio State, a graduate student at Ohio State.

César C. García Hernández (18:57)
who was targeted by the ⁓ trump administration because of the years old motor vehicle violation in which she she hit an ornamental wall ornamental brick wall near near a home and you know reversed into it and

that turned into a very minor sort of criminal infraction, all of a sudden, several years down the road, that becomes the hinge that the Trump administration used to declare her to be dangerous, to her presence in the United States to be contrary to national security. And the Trump administration has a willing partner in the university that issues her a notice saying,

William Robinson (19:24)
you Okay.

César C. García Hernández (19:41)
your visa has been revoked, you can no longer come to campus as a student, as a researcher, or as a teacher.

litigation, that student actually wins as did every other student who sued.

the Trump administration over an attempt to revoke their student visa status. But the university never retracts, never publicly apologizes to that student or anyone else, instead ⁓ accepting this dangerousness rhetoric that's coming out of the Trump administration wholeheartedly and making

William Robinson (20:09)
.

César C. García Hernández (20:18)
sort of spur-of-the-moment knee-jerk decisions that have a fairly strong adverse impact on the quality of life of the people who ostensibly are at the core of the university's mission. And we see that over and over again in universities across the United States in which capitulation becomes the first and the favorite response to pressure from the Trump administration, even when

Turns out that that pressure is not grounded in any legal authority that the administration had.

William Robinson (20:49)
Yeah, thank you for that, Cesar. And I hope we can circle back to this issue of what role is our university administrators playing, right? But first, I want to follow up on something that Naomi said, and thank you, Naomi, for introducing that word, a fascist, because we need to really to talk about the F word. I think we are seeing an embryonic fascist state. It's not consolidated. In part, it's not consolidated because all of the resistance, including in all of our cities, every time I says, come, we put up

mass resistance culminating most recently with Minnesota. But here's the link between this fascist project and the war on immigrants on and off our campus. And for me, that link in part is ICE itself. Because for me, ICE is the new brown shirts. ⁓ It's this emerging paramilitary force. And it's a force which through its aggression and terror,

is really attempting to, in my analysis, bridge the gap between developing this embryonic fascist state and a fascist reorganization of civil society. And that fascist reorganization in civil society, its cutting edge is this war on ⁓ immigrants and everything it involves. And then so it's in that context where our universities are brought in, Or then we to ⁓ see what's going on in our campuses.

Abbie Boggs (22:06)
I I think the question of criminalization is really crucial to what William is talking about there. That criminalization becomes the way to rationalize the kind of state violence targeted towards and directed at particular populations. You have to kind of have this tool. I've been watching and talking to my students a lot more about how the immigrant has gone from being an immigrant to being a criminal immigrant almost always, by

And that seems really crucial to shaping and making allowances for this massive ice buildup. so too does watching the of violence is directed at Palestinians over the last three or four years. In the kind of live stream genocide we've been watching, it's desensitized people to think it's OK to watch people in this country also be attacked with animals, but also with a pepper spray and many other things in these kind of horribly violent ways.

there's just been this acceptance of really fascistic behavior by the state.

Naomi Paik(23:01)
And fascism takes place through policing. We have to understand that, right? That is the arm of the fascist state, is policing. And now with the one big, beautiful bill that William referenced earlier, not only do we see this massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in terms of, you got to look at the tax breaks as well, in addition to the evisceration of all the welfare state and like these new work requirements and all of these things.

Naomi Paik(23:28)
And also the

$170 billion that is about to go to ICE or to DHS, right? To massively expand the deportation infrastructure, the camps, the concentration camps that we're going to be seeing. All of this stuff works together, right? But you have to look at the policing arm of it as being the kind of leading edge. And this, it's not just about ICE, it's also about CBP, but it's really about, you know, what William was saying. They are the new brown shirt.

William Robinson (23:35)
Yeah. .

Naomi Paik(23:58)
right? And it also works hand in hand with extra state violence as well. And the only, I mean, we have seen from our own employers, we cannot count on them. We are on our own to the extent that we can fight back against the fascist reorganization of society. It has to come from regular people. It has to come from just us. We like our universities have abandoned us. That's just the fact of the matter.

William Robinson (24:03)
Yeah. you

And how do we link in that regard the struggle on our campuses to defend our students, whether they're anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian freedom students, or they're immigrant students, how do we link our campus struggles to the larger social struggles raging throughout society that's absolutely crucial?

Abbie Boggs (24:42)
Well, how do we use the resources that our institutions are, right? They're these vast concentration of resources and time and people that have done many violent things over their histories and continue to do many violent things. And yet, they're also this rather unique space for organizing and study and thinking and kind of collectivity. So figuring out how to kind of exist within that contradiction and kind of exploit it.

Vineeta Singh (25:06)
And that's how we get organizing spaces like AAUP on campuses too, right? In the last few years, we've seen a lot of growth in AAUP chapters in organizing and higher ed spaces more broadly. So I'm also wondering if we can speak a little bit to lessons in organizing,

How do we use the momentum of this moment to create sustainable organizing practices,

both as individuals and as members of these various collectives like AAUP

William Robinson (25:37)
part of the larger story here of this, again, I'll say an embryonic, you know, fascist state is this sweeping attack on free speech and academic freedom, which includes, but even goes beyond the war on immigrants. And, you know, part of that story is on many of our campuses, we are facing this academic repression. And so I am at University of California, Santa Barbara right down the road, University of California, Los Angeles,

They are facing a Department of Justice lawsuit, a Title VII lawsuit, saying that Jewish professors are in an environment of harassment. And I want to point out that I think it was over 100, I think 130, 140 Jewish professors at UCLA signed an open letter saying, don't dare try and repress our academic freedom in the name of defending us because you're not defending us.

But I think part of, think we have to string all of this together, see all of these multiple links and our academic freedom ⁓ is on severe attack across ⁓ the country. ⁓ And also there's massive defunding for those of us that do critical research, especially in the social sciences and that's not unrelated.

Naomi Paik (26:43)
Right. And this is all part of their plan. I mean, this is all laid out in project 2025 and Hey, hey, ho ho. Ethnic studies has got to go. And also project Esther. All of these reports are intimately related to each other. And like the whole thing is like, they want to attack Palestine, the pro - Palestine movement as a wedge to destroy the left entirely. And they've said that out loud in that report. And then they are attacking higher ed institutions because we are.

William Robinson (26:48)
Yes.

Naomi Paik (27:11)
not only laboratories of democratic organizing and thinking and and, ⁓ you know, bringing different kinds of people together to think about big problems, but we're also like our mission, our missions ostensibly are about educating the public and creating people who are able to engage in a democratic process intelligently and thoughtfully even when we're in disagreement 

So that is why we are a locus of their ire, That's why we're enduring these attacks right now. And so all of these things are intimately related to each other. I think it's hard for us to kind of step back sometime and see those connections because when you're under attack, all you can think about is that attack, right?

I don't think there's anything wrong with focusing in terms

of like how you spend your energy, how you spend your organizing, by picking a lane because we cannot do all the things. But every now and then you have to step back and see how these struggles are all intimately related to each other. And I think what's also very crucial in terms of the organizing aspect is that even if you're not working on Palestine, for example, you're working on

immigration or the sciences or funding, something like that, that you don't get in the way of those other struggles, but actually see, like, even if you're not throwing down for that struggle, that you see that they are connected to each other and that my support, even if I can't dedicate time to there, that my actual support of that issue is also bolstering my own struggle over here, whether it's trans and gender affirming care in our university hospitals or the attacks on queer folks or immigrants, like they're all working together. And so the only way we're gonna, we have a chance at fighting back is if we see those connections

and we don't get in each other's way.

Abbie Boggs (28:59)
of project 25's goal with higher education is also to make higher education less attainable for women. Because they see that as part of their pro-natalist project. That why there's too few babies being born is because too many women are going to college. So if we can stop funding colleges for women to go there, we would get a higher birth rate,

And then also in the last couple of days, the State Department has put out a new memo requiring that people's visas match their birth genders, which has all kinds of implications now for anyone in the US in any status of kind of naturalization, green card, visa holder, who has any kind of mismatch in their documentation. It's now being talked about as kind of visa fraud, to have a visa that doesn't have your birth sex on it, assigned sex at birth. So I think...
keeping the gender and gender identity stuff in this mix is really crucial also.

So thank you for bringing it up.

César C. García Hernández (29:45)
The other aspect of this, I think is important to this conversation is that as academics, we are at base intellectual workers. We are workers, we have a workplace, and we have all of the interpersonal and institutional dynamics that go along with that. But we are also intellectuals. And so the way in which we can engage in these struggles quite often ⁓ is

William Robinson (29:56)
Okay. you

César C. García Hernández (30:10)
most

naturally born of the intellectual work that we do on a daily basis and for many of us is the principal motivator for deciding that this is the career path we wanted

And so as we think about where we are today as a country, as institutions and as individual,

William Robinson (30:30)
.

César C. García Hernández (30:30)
⁓ intellectual

workers, the way that we engage is just as varied as the intellectual work that we do. So for some of us, it's of course going to take on an organizing flavor. For others of us, organizing is not something that we have interest or competency to do.

And that may take on

a completely different style. I recently helped organize and participated in a teach-in about the rights that people have when encountering immigration officers on and around campus. And it was attended by over 200 people. And that's the kind of

engagement that I enjoy and that I have the capacity to do. whereas other folks might prefer to do something else, right? And I think this is a moment where there is no shortage of ways in which to engage in these all important issues. On the contrary, you know, we need to serve a on deck moment in which

William Robinson (31:17)
.

César C. García Hernández (31:32)
every kind of engagement ought to be welcomed.

William Robinson (31:36)
I'm so glad, Cesar that you used the word intellectual workers because, you know, historically, we in academia, we have a privileged position and we don't consider ourselves workers, but we are. And now that's becoming more evident than ever because the professoriate is facing the same precariatization.

as all workers. And that's, I think, the whole point that Brooke Rowlings, the Secretary of Agriculture, saying, wants citizens and more generally citizen workers to have the same precarious condition as immigrant workers. And so we are seeing a precariousization of the professoriate, was adjunct professors and so forth, which reminds us that, yes, we are workers.

with a special type of work, which is intellectual labor.

I think there is a corporate agenda, which is part of the story of the war on immigrants and also the war on academic freedom, which of course are two sides of a similar coin. And that corporate agenda for me involves two dimensions. one is that we've seen a gradual corporate colonization of the university, the creation of the neoliberal university. And so corporations fund the kind of research they want

including war research, war and repression research, And the second thing is this war on immigrants is enormously profitable for corporations. These concentration camps are all run by private corporations. The deportation jets, the airplanes that deport immigrants are contracted out to private corporations. The concentration camps, Naomi mentioned that

to take warehouses and turn them into concentration camps All of that construction is done by private corporations. So, you know, the corporate, aggressive corporate agenda here is part of this whole

I think we really need to lean into the fact that we are workers, that we are employees. Many of us are state employees of a state bureaucracy. But I also wanted to riff off of what Cesar was saying earlier, that there's no shortage of ways of how to engage and that this is an all hands on deck moment.

I think that academics kind of underestimate their own capacities and their own abilities of the different ways they can engage. So obviously we are teachers, we are knowledge producers, we are researchers. All of those skills can be put to use in this moment.

like finding the receipts on where exactly these detention centers are being built, for example, or just doing data tracking is really important work, right? Doing Know Your Rights trainings with people in your community is really important. Teaching about these topics all the time and not ⁓ abiding by these assaults on academic freedom, practicing it and exercising it every day. This is all part of our daily work and also

All of us are capable of learning new things and learning new skills, right? So we can take those skills that we already have and use them for these movements. We can also learn how to do new things, We all have communication skills. Some of us are better at certain parts of it than others. Everyone is capable of doing a one-on-one conversation, Everyone is capable of doing canvassing, So like on my campus,

I work at an urban campus. It's a commuter school. We're a Hispanic serving institution. We're an AAPI serving institution. And we were undergoing Operation Midway Blitz in the fall, right? So some of the things that we did were canvassing the businesses around our campus and canvassing campus offices, Because campus workers weren't sure what to do.

if ICE showed up. And even though we give Know Your Rights presentations regularly and like that are also very well attended on Zoom it's still hard to get that information out when the infrastructure of the university itself is not distributing this information, So we're like, okay, well then how do we get this information out? We have to take it to people, right? But everyone can do this. It is not.

difficult work, it just feels unfamiliar. And so I think one of the capacities that we have as intellectual workers at universities where thousands of people are congregating every single day, that is a resource, right? We don't think of it as resource in terms of funding or infrastructure, but it is a kind of ⁓ human infrastructure.


Naomi Paik (35:44)
like simple things that we can do

to harness that human infrastructure and mobilize it and put it in a certain direction. And it draws on skills that we already have. So one of the things that I would like to emphasize to the academics who are listening to this podcast is like, don't underestimate your own ability to do other things that you haven't necessarily been trained to do or haven't done before. You can do it. And it's important that we all do a little bit of this as we move forward. Cause when ice comes to your city,

you're going to find out that you can do a lot more than you thought you were capable of before. And a lot of it is, simple things and just showing I participated in patrols, which means that I go stand on a corner. That's what I'm doing. You know, it's not hard, but I have to be consistent and I have to show up and I have to, be engaged with the students and parents. Like I patrol at elementary schools in my

So I have to be engaged with the people there. You know what I mean? But it's not like,

⁓ something that I had to learn. So don't underestimate what you're capable of. you already know how to do a lot of things from your training, but you can also do so many more things.

César C. García Hernández (36:50)
I think we also should not underestimate the role of fear and of risk and perceived risk.

William Robinson (36:51)
you

César C. García Hernández (37:04)
are living in a moment in which threats are bandied about with abandon, from the president to university presidents.

William Robinson (37:08)
. .

César C. García Hernández (37:18)
and deans and chairs. We are seeing publicly and privately people have their positions, their titles, their livelihoods

threatened. most of us, despite being relatively privileged workers within the United States, we still have to work.

William Robinson (37:39)
Okay.

César C. García Hernández (37:40)
We still need an income. We still have mortgages and loans and sometimes children or aging parents ⁓ who need our support. so I think it's important to keep in mind that those threats can land quite hard

William Robinson (37:52)
Okay.

César C. García Hernández (37:57)
And that's the entire point. My response to this environment of fear ⁓ is that we are all individually stronger when we are acting collectively. When the AAUP, I think, is a fabulous illustration of that.

of

is as strong on our own, right as we may be, if we are standing alone. It is far easier to withstand pressures from chairs and from deans and from senior colleagues and from advisors and from university presidents and presidents above that. we are acting

William Robinson (38:21)
. .

César C. García Hernández (38:40)
in coordination and in community with others. And that begins through just personal

relationships. That begins by showing up. That begins by participating in the existing organizations that are present on our campuses, whether it's particular sort of disciplinary focused centers or programs or organizations like the AAUP.

William Robinson (38:52)
.

César C. García Hernández (39:05)
and, fostering the interpersonal relationships that create investments

in one another as members of a shared, community of interest. so I would say, think echoing, Naomi, very much encourage, academics out there who are listening to continue to be engaged and to increase their engagement.

with organizations like AAUP and others what we're going to find folks who are interested in those bonds of solidarity that are no more important than when we are under attack. And this is a moment in which our employers are under attack and we individually as the people who

constitute universities who breathe life into universities. We are under attack, if not directly by name, than somebody else down the hall or across campus is, or soon will be.

Abbie Boggs (39:55)
I would just add to that that, yes, I think the collective answer is, the collective is the answer in many ways kind of collective action, but not only in already existing structures, like Miriam Kaba, for instance, who's a fantastic abolitionist thinker whose work I follow, you she'll say, we need a million different experiments. And sometimes they're going to fail. And that's okay, because you just have to keep showing up and keep trying to do the things and the things matter. ⁓ that experimentation is also crucial. I think thinking kind of multi-prong organizing.

⁓ where you maybe focus your energies in the thing that you feel kind of strongly about and feel you have a great capacity for, but also keeping, as Naomi was saying earlier, kind of the broader perspective and imagining what else can be done, right? That we kind of have to innovate and come up with new ways of approaching these questions because the terrain in which we're operating is also changing. And right now it doesn't totally feel like we're winning. And

Abbie Boggs (40:47)
so maybe we need to do new things to kind of keep pushing what's possible.

Naomi Paik (40:50)
I think we saw that really wonderfully by the people of the Twin Cities and throughout Minnesota as well. They were so creative and they really showed that it really is collective and it doesn't have to run through organizations. You know I mean? In fact, some of the organizations, like the city government, got in the way. So it's like, this is like block by block, people, neighbors coming together and figuring out shit on their own, on the fly because they had to. And there was so much creativity that they showed in their tactics, like setting up their own checkpoints with outdoor fire pits and things like this. But also people just showing up for each other in all these different ways, seeing the need, not just the mutual aid for immigrants themselves, like food deliveries and things like this, but also

making sure that they had people outside the jail and detention centers at 24 seven in the middle of the night. Cause they knew that certain people were going to be released into negative 20 degree winter weather with no phone, without their coats And so they had people ready to give those people rides, to give those people rides home. And so that if I know that I'm going to be taken care of and I'm putting myself at risk and that I might go to jail.

Naomi Paik (42:08)
that I will be taken care of at the way home, that gives me confidence to keep on going out there. And so I think those different kinds of experimental ways of thinking and organizing and just throwing down for each other and making sure that people's needs are taken care of, that is the way that we're gonna get through this.

Abbie Boggs (42:25)
another thing about Minnesota that was so impressive, that all the posts and everything I was seeing about the organizing documented the kind of horrors of ICE's presence and all that they were doing, but always balanced that with a pretty lengthy discussion of the collective organizing they were doing.

and how much that was kind of empowering them. And I don't know, it made organizing sound beautiful. And that's an amazing thing to produce and put into the world. I've spoken to some organizers out there, but I still can't get a sense of like, how did that happen? How do they make that work so well? Because it was really impressive and effective.

César C. García Hernández (43:02)
I was reminded

survey that Pew did in February and beginning of March of 2025, in which 16 % of their respondents, these were adults in the United States, 16 % of respondents said that

they did not think the United States should deport anyone. They were given a list of options of various reasons why people should be deported. 16 % said none, do not deport anyone. As somebody who's written about the legal arguments to not deport anyone, specifically people who have engaged in criminal activity, even I found that to be a very high number.

That was about a year ago, eight months later, by January of this year, before we started to see things really become violent in places like Minneapolis, the Economist issued the results of a poll that they did in which they found that 46 % of respondents said they wanted

of ICE to be abolished. That's a gigantic growth in just eight

William Robinson (44:17)
Mm hmm.

César C. García Hernández (44:19)
months done by an entity that I don't think anyone's going to accuse of having a leftist bias. And so think what we're seeing is that the ideas travel fast, ideas do change opinions, and then converting that into political action in terms of

Organizing is the first step to converting the political action in the form of electoral shifts and legal shifts through legislatures. I think there are nuggets of evidence available to us to suggest that

the kind of intellectual work that academics do, right, public education, data gathering, data creating, educating is vitally important and does continue to resonate. And I think that that's motivation enough, at least for me, to continue the kind of work that many of us do and take joy in doing.

Abbie Boggs (45:26)
I agree with you and I'm gonna keep doing the work too. ⁓ And here's my more negative thought, pessimistic thought. if we're in this embryonic or existing fascism, power doesn't necessarily seem to work in a way that the polls matter, right? Like don't think that we're under kind of a hegemonic form of governance right now. I think there's no need to get consent from the masses or from...

our students or even from alums in our campuses, right, the board, can do what they want to do as we've seen at Columbia and at Barnard. I think we're seeing this more broadly that they're not trying to woo us into believing in their righteousness anymore. The kind of the might is taking over. We're seeing this in Iran, of course, right now and certainly in Gaza. So I don't know what to how to organize in light of that. when kind of reason is not the thing that's going to get us very far.

Abbie Boggs (46:16)
I'm pretty sure there's a pessimistic thing to elicit more positive responses, hopefully.

Naomi Paik (46:21)
one of the things that organizers in Chicago say a lot, like, ⁓ I'm going to shout out to Ray Wences here, and this is drawing on Latin American democracy movements, but there's different strategies and they all count and they all matter, but working within the state, against the state and alongside the state, right?

And so I think we need to deploy all of these strategies and not just put everything into one. I understand that we do need legislative change. Absolutely. We need to abolish Ira, Ira and Edpa and like other, the one big beautiful bill. we do need, unfortunately we need to kind of make pleas on the government, but at the same time, I'm not spending my time there. Do you know what I'm saying?

Naomi Paik (47:08)
And I think the same with university administration. So we do make demands on our administrations, on our board of trustees. We do that very consistently. There are certain other people, not me, who are very good at doing those kinds of negotiations and things like that. that's not where I personally have facility. I don't have the discipline, behavioral discipline for that.

But there are other things that I do. And so I think working alongside the state and against the state are the kind of tactics that I use. But there's a lot of things that we can do on our own and that freedom is not, liberation is not something that we wait for. It's something that we create daily and practice with each other.

And I'm seeing a lot of this with the community defense

as well, both on my campus and just in the city and like viewing what's happening in other places and things like this. But there is a lot that we can do just on our own and for each other. And yes, it's always going to meet the limits of capacity. none of us are billionaires. None of us have infinite time. Everyone needs rest. But one thing that I heard from another organizer with Ujima Medics here in Chicago is that

When we're resting, so like after Bovino left Chicago, I think a lot of people were just, you know, in not a great place. But it's like we rest, but that rest is also get ready, right?
prepare for, for whatever comes next. And then also share knowledge. What did we learn? these are democratic practices in action that don't require anything from the state.

And I think that is also how we build the kind of relationships that people power with each other to perhaps that can be mobilized later on when conditions change, when we have a different enemy in office, where we could actually make those kinds of pushes as well. But for me right now, there is no point in making hails on the state.

Vineeta Singh (49:02)
So this feels like the perfect time to ask for homework. Do you all have suggestions of resources or organizations you might recommend to our listeners as they continue to learn how to be effective and sustainable organizers as higher education workers?

Naomi Paik (49:21)
I would want to shout out the Drop ICE campaign that the Sunrise Movement and YDSA and some faculty organizations, HELU and some others are endorsing. I would really ⁓ encourage everyone to look that up and join that campaign. It's very well organized. They have five specific corporate targets that support ICE, so Hilton, Enterprise,

Target, Flock AI. A lot of our campuses have automated license plate readers that use AI and that feed that information to DHS. We need to get rid of that as soon as possible. and I'll just like in a self-interested way, shout out the Sanctuary Campus Network.

You know, we work in coalition with Scholars for Social Justice, the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and other organizations.

William Robinson (50:14)
100 % ditto to everything you just said, Naomi, and I'll just add more locally, many of our campuses, including my own, have Academics for Justice in Palestine. And we need to continue our work on that front as well.

Abbie Boggs (50:29)
I might just shout out the Debt Collective as one of their organizations to kind of look into ⁓ and to think with. They have a great Jubilee school going on right now that you can follow along with. So check them out.

Vineeta Singh(53:41)
That's it for this episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a special series of AAUP presents presented in collaboration with

That's a wrap for this episode of Academic Freedom on the Line, a special series of AUP Presents produced in collaboration with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom. I've been your host, Vineetha Singh. Before I let you go, let me just reiterate my key takeaways, the things that I'm going to embroider on pillows, that I'm going to put on sticky notes all over my monitor, that I'm going to figure out a way to make stick.

Don't get in each other's ways. Don't underestimate what you can do. Organizing is beautiful.

And it's all about consistency. So keep showing up for each other. Thank you.