It was a matter of time—not that it made the news any easier to bear.
Late last month, President Trump’s cruel immigration crackdown ensnared one of our members, a janitorial supervisor at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse who was taken into custody with his husband as they waited for their scheduled immigration hearing.
We were sickened but not surprised. Our union, United University Professions, is America’s largest higher education union. With over 40,000 SUNY academics and professionals as members, we represent people from across the country and around the world. Our campuses are vibrant, welcoming places that value diversity and academic freedom and encourage differing points of view.
Not surprisingly, our campuses and hospitals are fat targets for Trump’s mass deportation plan. Higher ed has always been on the administration’s radar. Since January, the Trump administration has all but dismantled the Education Department, decimated DEI programs, withheld billions in research funding and tried to bully colleges and universities to sign his higher ed compact—basically a Trump loyalty oath that undermines academic freedom.
Trump’s immigration crackdown has wreaked havoc as well.
NBC News reports that new international new-student enrollment dropped this year by 17%. Academics, researchers and scientists have departed the U.S. in droves, and their international counterparts are staying away—not necessarily by choice. It’s much harder for foreign professionals and academics to obtain visas to live and work in Trump’s America.
And it’s been open season on immigrants. ICE agents, incompetent, savage and without conscience, have snatched up tens of thousands of people nationwide, the vast majority without criminal convictions. These are not the “the worst of the worst” that Trump railed about and promised to deport. Far from it.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering website founded at Syracuse University in 1989, reports that more than 71 percent of nearly 60,000 immigrants in detention as of Sept. 21 had no criminal convictions. And many of those convicted committed minor offenses, such as traffic violations.
During recent raids in Chicago, more than 97 percent of immigrants picked up had no criminal convictions. Of 614 immigrants detained, just 16 had significant criminal histories, according to The Chicago Tribune, citing Department of Homeland Security information.
We still don’t know why our member, Alex Gonzalez, and his husband, Yan Vazquez—a CSEA member—were apprehended by ICE agents.
What we know is that they fled Cuba in the early 2020s to seek asylum in the U.S. and were working through the process when they were apprehended. They purchased a home in a Syracuse suburb. They were gainfully employed at Upstate and are hard workers and good neighbors.
Alex is UUP. His husband is CSEA. We chose to fight, the same way we will stand up and fight for any UUP member swept up in Trump’s immigration nightmare.
With a frigid wind blowing falling snow sideways, more than 300 people rallied in front of the James M. Hanely Federal Building in downtown Syracuse Nov. 10 to call for the couple’s release. UUP staged the rally with help from CSEA, NYSUT, the Greater Syracuse Labor Council, the Central New York Area Labor Federation and community groups.
Syracuse Mayor-elect Sharon Owens was there. NYSUT President Melinda Person was there. So was Brittany Anderson, executive director of Pride at Work, a national LGBTQ-plus advocacy organization. We also held two vigils to keep Alex and Yan in the public eye as they sit in a Buffalo-area federal detention center awaiting their fates.
And we sent an unmistakable message to our members and anyone else watching: UUP will always protect our members. Always.
We are not naïve. More union members will be swept up in Trump’s deportation push. ICE needs to up its numbers. Trump has set a goal of 1 million deportations each year, one reason ICE has been terrorizing cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and lately, Charlotte, North Carolina.
We stand ready to act. And we take comfort from Robert F. Kennedy’s famous “ripple of hope” quote from his 1966 Day of Affirmation Address:
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance".
We, all of us, are that hope. Together, we will stand in solidarity with our colleagues, and in doing so, testify to the dream of a just and free America where those who play by the rules and live by the law will be welcomed into our communities.
Dr. Fred Kowal is President of the 35,000 member United University Professions, which represents faculty on 29 New York State Campuses. UUP is an affiliate of NYSUT, The American Federation of Teachers, The National Education Association and the AFL-CIO.
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