Over 1,000 students, alumni, and members of campus groups at Georgetown and George Washington University signed a petition to block the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement from participating in a law school job fair.
“ICE is a fascist organization, tasked with carrying out ethnic cleansing, family separation, and extreme brutality and violence,” states a letter to the deans of the two universities’ law schools.
Georgetown and George Washington University are hosting the Public Sector Recruiting Program on Friday, a virtual career fair for law students interested in public sector jobs, The Hoya, Georgetown University’s oldest student-run paper, reports.
The petition claims that ICE is “violating the human rights of immigrant communities and obfuscating the fact that the United States is a country stolen from Indigenous communities and built by enslaving Black people.”
The law schools did not honor the request. Representatives of the two agencies were still permitted to attend the career fair, according to the Georgetown Voice, another student-run newspaper.
As a result of ICE and DHS participating in the job fair, multiple groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, chose not to participate in the career fair, The Georgetown Voice reports.
The push to block the agencies came as the Trump administration continues large scale immigration enforcement operations in cities across the U.S. despite protests and increased threats against immigration officials.
Since Trump returned to the White House just over a year ago, ICE agents are facing a 1,300% increase in assaults and an 8,000% increase in death threats, according to the homeland security department.
Minneapolis has become a flashpoint for anti-ICE protests following an ICE-involved shooting on Jan. 7 that left 37-year-old Renee Good dead.
Good, according to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, attempted to use her vehicle as a weapon against the ICE agent. Some eyewitnesses and Democratic officials disputed that account, saying Good attempted to drive away from agents.
As recently as Friday morning, protesters gathered outside a federal building in Minneapolis where Greg Bovino, U.S. Border Patrol commander, and Marcos Charles, ICE Executive Assistant Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, held a press conference to discuss immigration enforcement operations in the city.
“They’re trying to … impede us from getting out of the building and going to do our mission,” Charles said. “I will tell you right now, they’re going to fail, because no matter what they put up in front of us, we are here to do a job to protect this community, to protect Minnesotans, and to keep the criminal legal aliens off the street.”
