Trump Shreds the Constitution to Better Hound Immigrants and Eviscerate Universities

So far, at least 10 universities, including Florida A&M and the above-mentioned New College, have entered into such agreements. Two more are in the process of negotiating MOUs. By month’s end, all state universities in Florida will be operating as extensions of ICE. Campus police in Florida will be able to question, arrest, and detain students suspected of immigration violations—a shocking departure from the idea that campuses are supposed to be a safe haven for students.

In Texas this month, legislators approved a law, SB 37, that would empower anyone in the state to file complaints against universities and specific faculty members who they believe are teaching history, sociology, gender studies, or any other social science in a way that they do not approve of. If a state committee, made up of political appointees, agrees with the grievance and deems the course “ideological,” it could pull university funding. If someone teaches a history of the LGBTQ+ movement or paints an unflattering portrait of the United States, it could similarly place the school’s funding and the professor’s career in jeopardy.

Legislators pitched this as a way to ensure academic diversity and protect against liberal bias in the classroom; in reality, it is creating an incentive structure for conservatives to go hunting for academics—similar to how SB 8 paved the way for vigilante lawsuits against people involved in providing, or helping women access, abortion services. If anyone didn’t get the point, Texas’s political leadership made sure to shout it from the rooftops; shortly after its passage, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick declared on X that “looney [sic] Marxist UT professors should find a friendly blue state to move to so we can fill their roles with quality conservative professors who will teach critical thinking.”

This sort of legislation is McCarthyism, along with its loyalty oaths, updated for the Trump era—the obsessions may be slightly different, but the chilling effect is largely the same.

In Indiana, a new law aims to neuter tenure—and the academic protections and freedom of speech guarantees that tenure provides—by requiring faculty at state universities to undergo a tenure review every five years to make sure they are encouraging “intellectual diversity.” The clear subtext is that those who teach ideas that MAGA commissars dislike could lose their tenure and income. The bill is similar to one already on the books in Florida, which led nearly half of the tenured faculty in state institutions who responded to an American Association of University Professors survey to report that they were looking for jobs out of state.

Indiana is hardly an outlier. Seven other Republican-controlled state legislatures—Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, and Texas—are also considering GOP bills to curtail or eliminate university tenure.

If these bills pass, they will accelerate a decline in tenure long in the making. An American Association of University Professors study this past February showed a precipitous decline in the percentage of faculty who are tenured over the last 40 years. Ongoing GOP efforts will make academic jobs even more contingent on the whims of local and national political leaders.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the war on immigrants and enforcing harsh policies in academic settings, hard-line GOP legislators in Tennessee have decided not to stop at the universities but to move to attempt to strip undocumented children of their right to a K-12 schooling. This effort—which is similar to one that California voters attempted via citizen initiative in the early 1990s, only for it to be struck down by the US Supreme Court—was put on hold after a public outcry, but it’s in keeping with a slew of other recent moves in GOP-led states.

Several legislators in Texas and in Indiana are proposing similar measures to the Tennessee bill. And in Oklahoma, a conservative state board of education recently pushed to require schools to request and store details on children’s and parents’ immigration status, by mandating that parents require proof of citizenship or legal status, or a declaration of undocumented status, when enrolling kids. Ultimately, that proved a bridge too far even for the GOP governor, who nixed the effort in mid-February.

All of this stands in contrast to blue states that, increasingly, are looking to pass legislation aimed at preventing ICE agents from accessing their schools or from staking out the streets in the immediate vicinity of schools. And when Department of Homeland Security agents recently attempted to enter two Los Angeles elementary schools in pursuit of five undocumented children whom they somehow had decided were national security threats, school officials refused the agents entry and were subsequently backed up by the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent.

More so by the day, the stories of immigration and of educational freedom are becoming the stories of two Americas. Blue America is doing its best to protect immigrants and defend the integrity of schools and universities in the face of a federal onslaught; meanwhile, red America is increasingly serving as handmaid to a Trump administration heedless both of the rule of law and of the most basic notions of decency.