City College Academic Senate urged the San Diego Community College District to affirm free speech protections for student and employee activists at its regular meeting on Monday.
The request came in the form of a statement letter approved by the senate.
The letter’s asks included “a comprehensive list of campus and community resources available to affected students and employees,” “financial assistance for impacted students and employees facing hardship” and “a firm commitment to supporting campus activism and upholding First Amendment rights.”
The letter was sponsored by Senate President Mona Alsoraimi-Espiritu, Secretary Norell Martinez, Past President Justin Akers, Senator Darius Spearman and Chair of Chicano Studies America Martinez.
At the beginning of the semester, the district updated Administrative Procedure 3415 to limit who can interact with immigration enforcement to only SDCCD Chancellor Greg Smith and the district’s general counsel.
“(AP 3415) is great, but I do think it’s really important to make sure that there are no loopholes in which someone could claim that pro-Palestinian activism is hate speech and a crime,” Alsoraimi-Espiritu said. “That’s what I really want to emphasize, that student activists are not criminals.”
The letter comes amid increased visa cancellations across the country, including 36 at the University of California, San Diego and four at San Diego State University. Authorities have increasingly targeted students with pro-Palestinian views, although these students were not the only recipients of immigration-related enforcement.
“As a history major, there is a repeated history within the United States that starts with the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mexican Repatriation, Japanese Internment,” said Inter-Club Council President Sergio Montiel during public comment. “It is a continued history of targeting people who have gone the legal way of getting into this country that they all stress about, and now they are specifically targeting the people (who) did it right.”
In a March 27 interview with City Times, Smith said that if the federal government attempted to come and apprehend an individual for exercising free speech on an SDCCD campus, they would not comply, unless they have a court order that “binds and requires us.”
“Even then, there are options we have to explain to the court why we oppose that enforcement on our campus,” he said. “We’ll take every legal avenue we have to deny that.”
Alsoraimi-Espiritu said this effort is also for herself.
“My option was, like many of us, either to pull back from some of this work and be safe and protected and protect my family, or to continue to do this work and know that I am putting myself at risk of whatever it is the administration wants to do,” she said.
But for her, stepping back is off the table.
“More important for safety in our family is for them to know that others are as important as us,” she said.
Managing editor Bailey Kohnen contributed to this report.
Edited by Luke Bradbury, Tresean Osgood.
