Dear Chancellor Miranda:

At a town hall organized by a coalition of students, faculty, and staff on January 27, 2026, Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Student Affairs Michael Ginsburg addressed the crowd, insisting that “UIC is a sanctuary campus.” While we are encouraged by this assertion, our community has yet to see any concrete policies that support this claim. Instead, we have seen how UIC has failed to protect our community, neglecting to inform our campus about the abductions of two people outside the Student Services Building, allowing multiple international students to self-deport unnecessarily, and contributing to the deportation of an international student via false arrest by UICPD. We offer the proposed policies to make the pure assertion, “UIC is a sanctuary campus,” a reality.

Our coalition is prepared to assist the university administration in implementing policies that protect those most vulnerable to policing, surveillance, detention, and deportation, and refuse to leave anyone behind. We follow the lead of organizations like Mijente, which call for the expansion of sanctuary to all communities facing criminalization and emphasize the ways that partnerships with tech companies and third-party data brokers provide the “digital backbone” for ICE raids and ultimately, “sabotage sanctuary.”

We are inspired by immigrant justice organizing across Chicago and by Governor JB Pritzker’s signing of HB 1312. The law requires that all Illinois higher education campuses implement specific policies, some of which UIC has not yet met, including notifying the campus of confirmed immigration enforcement activity on campus.

For our campus to truly be a sanctuary, the following are non-negotiable.

TO PRESERVE THE SAFETY OF OUR COMMUNITY MEMBERS, UIC SHOULD

• Make online Know Your Rights trainings (as developed by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights) mandatory and provide Know Your Rights materials in the multiple languages spoken by members of the UIC population and surrounding communities.* Making these trainings mandatory is particularly urgent in light of the recent abduction of a student from a Columbia University residence hall by federal immigration agents.
• Issue ICE “safety alerts” when the administration receives confirmation that ICE agents are on campus or in the vicinity. The administration, as previously promised, should provide a clear radius or definition of what constitutes the campus and include streets adjacent to campus in its alerts.
• Provide signage clearly marking spaces that are legally defined as “private” and therefore off-limits to federal law- and immigration-enforcement agencies without a judicial warrant, while also ensuring that the UIC campus remains a welcoming public space for community members.
• Cancel all contracts with companies that cooperate with or assist ICE in carrying out its mass deportation campaigns, including those with Flock AI surveillance systems, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, and Enterprise Mobility. UIC must remove Flock cameras from its campus. As the ACLU reports, Flock’s surveillance data is being used by ICE to help carry out mass deportations, and the company is building “a dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure.” UIC must also end its contracts with the Hilton, which provides housing to ICE agents during immigration enforcement operations, and its contracts with Enterprise, which rents to ICE the very vehicles used to carry out abductions.
• Campus administration must ensure that UICPD is held to the same standards as CPD under the ICE on Notice ordinance, signed by Mayor Brandon Johnson in January 2026. Under the ordinance, officers are expected to document federal enforcement activities and store footage; identify federal agents and their supervisors; complete a report on any violation of state or local law by federal agents consistent with CPD policy; and immediately summon emergency medical services and render aid to any injured person on the scene.
• Post resources related to immigration enforcement prominently on the university website, on the landing page, and in an accessible way.*
• Ensure it does not share any information with federal agencies about students, faculty, or staff targeted for detention and deportation by the federal government unless absolutely compelled by the law with an authentic judicial warrant.*
• Develop alternatives to policing and punishment, holding campus police accountable for discrimination, misconduct, and other violations, and committing to reducing arrests, which are a funnel to detention and deportation.

TO ENSURE STUDENTS’ UNIMPEDED EDUCATIONAL AND EMPLOYMENT ACCESS, UIC SHOULD

• Offer more expansive financial aid and other resources to immigrant students by restoring the Memorandum of Understanding with the dream.us, which expired in 2024.

• Providing additional resources and staff for the Rigo Padilla Pérez Undocumented Student Resource Center. Ensuring legal aid for noncitizen members of our campus.

• Offer additional support and resources to international students by
• Funding employment for international students, facilitating access to employment off campus, and sharing specific language in the employment code that defines international students as a protected class.
• Permitting the attendance of a union representative in any interaction with campus international services.

• Require that all faculty have accommodation policies for students who are unable to attend class due to immigration emergencies. There are precedents for implementing campus-wide accommodations for students; last month, Lewis University in Oak Brook, Illinois, pivoted to remote learning after the administration learned of ICE presence on campus.

• Training Residential Assistants (RA)s on how to interact with federal agents and how to identify who is/isn’t police

* Proposals with an asterisk would ensure adherence to the requirements of HB 1312