by Madison Forde, The Hechinger Report
January 12, 2026
Last month, a Boston University junior proudly posted online that he had spent months calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report Latino workers at a neighborhood car wash.
Nine people were detained, including siblings and a 67-year-old man who has lived in the U.S. for decades. The student celebrated the arrests and told ICE to “pump up the numbers.”
As the daughter of Caribbean immigrants and a researcher who studies immigrant-origin youth, I was shaken but not surprised. This incident, which did have some backlash, revealed a growing problem on college campuses: Many young people are learning to police one another rather than learn alongside one another.
That means the new border patrol could be your classmate. Our schools are not prepared for this.
That is why colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging and take immediate steps to prevent it — as they do with racism, antisemitism and homophobia.
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The incident at Boston University is bigger than one student with extreme views. We are living in a moment shaped by online outrage, anonymous tip lines and a culture that encourages reporting anyone who seems “suspicious.”
In this environment, some young people have started to believe that calling ICE is a form of civic duty.
That thinking doesn’t stay online. It walks right into classrooms, dorms and group projects. When it does, the impact is not abstract. It is deeply personal for the immigrant-origin youth sitting in those same rooms.
Many of these students grew up with fear woven into their daily lives. Their neighbors disappeared overnight, they heard stories of parents being detained at work and they began translating legal mail before they were old enough to drive. They know exactly what an ICE call can set into motion. They carry that fear with them to school.
These are not hypothetical harms. They show up in everyday decisions: where to sit, what to say, whom to trust. I’ve met students who avoid speaking Spanish on campus, refuse to share their address during class activities and sit near the exits because they’re not sure who views their family as “a threat.” It is not possible to learn well in an environment where you do not feel safe.
There is a strong body of developmental research highlighting belonging and social inclusion as central to healthy development. In her work on migration and acculturation, Carola Suárez-Orozco shows that legal-status-based distinctions among youth intensify exclusion and undermine both social integration and developmental well-being.
When belonging erodes, colleges begin to function like small border zones, where everyone is quietly assessing who might turn them in. It is nearly impossible for any campus community to thrive under that kind of pressure.
Quite frankly, nor can America’s democracy.
If we raise a generation of students who feel compelled to police the nation’s borders from their dorms, the immigrant-origin youth sitting beside them in classrooms will carry the psychological burden of those borders every single day. Yet colleges are almost entirely unprepared for this reality.
Most universities have clear policies for racial slurs, antisemitic threats, homophobic harassment and other identity-based harms. But very few have policies that address immigration-based targeting, even though the consequences can be just as severe and, in some cases, life-altering.
Boston University’s president acknowledged the distress caused by that student’s actions. Yet, the university did not classify the behavior as discriminatory, despite the fact that his calls targeted a specific ethnic and immigration-status group. That silence sends a clear message: Harm against immigrant communities is unimportant, incidental or simply “political.” But this harm is neither political nor the price of free expression or civic engagement; it is targeted intimidation, with real and measurable consequences for students’ safety, mental health and academic engagement.
In my view, colleges need to take three straightforward steps:
1. Define immigration-based harassment as misconduct. Calling ICE on classmates, doxxing immigrant peers or circulating immigration-related rumors should be classified under the same conduct codes that protect students from other forms of targeted harm. Schools know how to do this; they simply have not applied those same protections to immigrant communities.
2. Train faculty and staff on how to respond. Professors should have a clear understanding of what to do when immigration rhetoric is weaponized in the classroom, or when students express fear about being reported. Although many professors want to help, they may lack basic guidance.
3. Teach immigration literacy as part of civic education. Most students do not understand what ICE detention entails, how long legal cases can drag on or what it means to live with daily fear like their immigrant peers. Teaching these realities isn’t “political indoctrination,” it is preparation for a life in a multicultural democracy.
These three steps are not radical. They are merely the same kinds of protections colleges already provide to students targeted for other aspects of their identity.
Related: STUDENT VOICES: ‘Dreamers’ like us need our own resource centers on college campuses
The Boston University case is a warning, not an isolated moment. If campuses fail to respond, more young people will internalize the idea that policing their peers is simply part of student life. Immigrant-origin youth, who have done nothing wrong, will carry the emotional burden alone.
As students, educators and researchers, we have to decide what kind of learning communities we want to build and sustain. Schools can be places where students understand one another, or they can become places of intense surveillance. That choice will shape not just campus climates, but also the society current students will eventually lead.
Madison Forde is a doctoral student in the Clinical/Counseling Psychology program at New York University.
Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].
This story about immigration-based targeting at colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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