Hundreds of protesters gathered outside of UCLA’s Murphy Hall on Thursday after an international graduate student was detained at the Mexican border.
About 200 UC students have had their visas revoked in recent weeks, some for reasons as minimal as traffic violations, according to associate professor Graeme Blair. He told KNX News’ Pete Demetriou that UC officials aren’t willing to fight the Trump administration on the cancellations.
“In a private meeting with faculty a couple of weeks ago, it was reported that UC President Michael Drake said that UC needs to not be the tallest nail and needs to let the Trump administration know that they're going to go along with this policy,” he said.
Few details have been released about the UCLA student detained at the border, who was still in Customs and Border Patrol custody as of Friday morning. According to a statement from the university, they were stopped while trying to enter the U.S. at the San Ysidro border crossing on Wednesday night.
“It’s very clear that this is just the very beginning,” Blair said. “The first wave was this small set of high-profile arrests of Palestine activists, and the next has been this focus on immigrants with very minor or nonexistent criminal history, and where they’re gonna go, we don't know, and that has left students in terror.”
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Some faculty members fear that if UC is seen as abandoning its role as a top university for foreign students, it will lose its status among learning institutions worldwide.
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