“Are you ready to defend the homeland?” If you are, Cornell Career Services is advertising the Deportation Officer position with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to students. By doing this, the university is actively jeopardizing its students’ well-being and capitulating to the Trump administration. As members of Cornell’s chapter of Young Democratic Socialists of America, we denounce the university’s blatant endangerment of our immigrant community, specifically Latinx students, who are disproportionately targeted by ICE.
A university that promotes enlistment in a position that actively targets our immigrant community members — and may even involve lying about your identity to detain people — fails to be an institution accessible for “any person, any study.” Cornell did not protect international Ph.D. student and pro-Palestine activist Momodou Taal when plainclothes ICE officers showed up at his house to detain him, forcing him to self-deport for his safety and ability to express himself freely. Promoting the agency that endangered Taal deepens the pre-existing atmosphere of fear and distrust for Cornell’s international and BIPOC students by platforming a role that puts their visa statuses in peril. We saw this when the Trump administration decided to haphazardly terminate over 1,840 Student and Visitor System records earlier this year, resulting in the revocation of 17 current and former Cornell students’ visas, which were later reinstated in late April as ICE prepared to work on a policy to “provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations.” This time, Cornell chose to jeopardize its student body by choosing to support ICE’s discriminatory practices through promoting recruitment efforts, demonstrating a moral ineptitude and failure to protect some of its most vulnerable students.
ICE preys on young, low-income BIPOC students and recent graduates nationally. The agency is adding 10,000 new agents to its workforce and using $76 billion from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” to fund sign-on bonuses of $50,000 for officers and promises of $60,000 toward student loan forgiveness. Loan forgiveness measurements alongside the defunding of college financial aid programs across the nation clearly target low-income minority groups, who are already underrepresented in higher education. Additionally, the qualifications for becoming a GL-7 Deportation Officer (who receive a larger salary than entry-level GL-5 members) include graduating in high standing from one’s college with a Bachelor’s degree, which is a requirement that singles out young college graduates. Those are the very people who may be looking for jobs through Cornell’s Career Services and Handshake sites. It is deplorable that the university is promoting a government position to its students that facilitates the spread of hate toward our immigrant neighbors and community members. Even if Cornell claims to not “promote certain jobs over others,” posting such a job listing on your central career network platform for thousands to see is not only fostering a connection with a fascist entity but a fascist move in and of itself.
It seems that Cornell only fights Trump’s fascist rebukes when they bring financial damage to the institution, not when students are harmed. While Cornell provides resources for undocumented and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students through legal help and a protocol on what to do when approached by ICE officers, they post recruitments for those very same officers they claim to protect their students from. And although Cornell signed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense as it aimed to implement a 15% cost cap on research assistance to higher education institutions, it did not support Harvard University’s litigation against the federal government that opposed the Trump administration’s move to freeze nearly $3 billion of Harvard’s federal research funding. Cornell resists only when it’s financially attractive.
Thus, it does not come as a surprise that the ICE Deportation Officer posting appeared on the Cornell Career Services page on Aug. 1, which is around the time the university was reportedly nearing an up to $100 million settlement with the federal government. Columbia University’s settlement with the Trump administration, which restored all paused federal grant funding, came with the removal of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives at the institution and allowed the government to monitor faculty hiring and student admissions. It appears as though Cornell is already giving in to Trump’s demands through its ICE postings, Border Patrol recruitment webinars and Zoom sessions for jobs at the United States Customs and Border Protection Agency. This is a sign of more fascist concessions to come.
Cornell is a well-known, world-renowned university, so its decision to facilitate recruitment to a position that requires the “arrest of individuals accused of violating immigration law” — the vast majority of whom actually have no criminal convictions — is immoral and completely inexcusable. Large research institutions like ours set a precedent for other universities, and currently the university is saying that we do not care for our immigrant students and community members. We are saying that we would rather capitulate to a fascist regime than serve and protect our student population. We are normalizing paramilitary recruitment on college campuses, which encourages the acceptance of militarization and military presence in our everyday lives. We are setting a new normal that only adds to the worsening of the status quo.
We call on Cornell to remove all ICE and Border Patrol positions from the Career Services page. The university must also be transparent on how Cornell-approved-employer decisions are made. No one can be truly neutral when choosing between the oppressor and the oppressed, and currently the presence of ICE recruitment on campus clearly illustrates that Cornell’s sympathies lie with the oppressor.
The Cornell community, whether undergraduate or graduate, faculty or staff, deserves better than an institution that extols inclusion while actively recruiting for exclusion.
Signed,
Kevin Chang ‘28
Romneya Quennell ‘26
Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America
Kevin Chang ‘28 is a Science & Technology Studies student in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at kc2273@cornell.edu.
Romneya Quennell ‘26 is a Biology & Society student in the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences. At YDSA, she serves on the Queer Solidarity and Communications Committees. She can be reached at rq53@cornell.edu.
Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America is a chapter of the youth and student branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the U.S.. The organization can be reached at cornell.ydsa@gmail.com.
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