Editor’s Note: Nell Srinath is a former editor of The Daily Campus.
Since his inauguration as 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump has signed more executive orders than that of any recent president’s first 100 days in office. Community organizers have been scrambling to respond to sweeping actions across the nation, specifically involving immigrant protection and human rights violations, since President Trump took office.
“It feels like the people who were concerned about the rights of undocumented peoples are caught unprepared, as though we have not spent the last couple years — the last administration — preparing for this” said Nell Srinath, the Connecticut field reporter for Inkstink Media. “We’re seeing across the country already that the Trump administration is making good on these promises to deport people en masse that in ways that are surprising and frankly quite cruel.”
According to Srinath, resistance must first come from within communities.
“The kind of organizing that we must do now is rapid response. Taking stock of what the power structure in your community is: Where is your regional ICE office? What are the demographics of your town like? How amicable is your local government to harsh enforcement or sanctuary city laws? And building a coalition of people to protect people in your community, based off that knowledge,” Srinath said.
Colin Rosadino, a sixth-semester law student at UConn Law, echoed Srinath’s sentiment.
“Personally, I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels with on campus protest, engaging in these symbolically meaningful battles. But at the end of the day, we all care about bigger issues and the bigger issues now are happening all around us,” Rosadino said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have been reported in municipalities near UConn campuses such as Willimantic and Hartford, according to Rosadino.
“There were a couple ICE raids in Willimantic. There’ve been a bunch in Hartford a bunch in New Haven and getting engaged more directly with what’s happening have always been the aim of on campus organizing” said Rosadino. “It’s the perfect moment to engage with the activists in our communities that have been doing really good work for years and maybe didn’t have that base of students to support them.”
Srinath expressed a similar sentiment.
“I think there are some issues that activists are better suited to face than others because they’re happening in our towns and in our cities,” she said.
But government threats included in one of the executive orders to “vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account” any person found in violation of the order still loom over activists.
“We are seeing the authorization of a force of military and police in a way that has not happened in this country in a very long time,” said Rosadino. “But I think students are ready to encounter that head on.”
College campuses are no longer hot spots for political discussion and debate, according to Rosadino. In fact, he said universities are actively working against their students.
“Campuses in general, and this is not isolated to UConn, are becoming a difficult place for protests, considering the size of the administrative state at these schools. You think about the number of administrators we have now compared to what we had even 10 to 20 years ago — the presence of police on these campuses. It’s a new ballgame and it makes it very difficult to do forms of protest that used to be commonplace on campuses,” Rosadino said
Rosadino believes there is a clear reason why.
“I think students are looking for a way to engage off campus and do things that feel more meaningful without the threat of stiff academic penalties. There’s bunch of students who were arrested at the [UConn] encampment who are facing $2,000 fines after those arrests, and we’re told that if they were to return to campus and do more activism or create noise on campus outside of the newly allotted time frames, that they would be suspended, that police would be called. If you wanted to suppress protests on campus that’s the way to do it. And they’ve done it,” he said.
That is not to say that activism is not ongoing, according to Srinath.
“It is going be a lot of the same. Although the rhetoric has changed significantly, the things that the United States is allowing, specifically regarding Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are functionally similar in the terms of the magnitude of human suffering, the denial of self-determination, human rights, so on and so forth,” Srinath said.
But while some goals may remain the same, tactics must change, according to Srinath.
“Things weren’t working during the Biden administration and they certainly not going to work under the Trump Administration, so we have to keep being scientific about what exactly is going to pressure our leaders to make good on their purported commitments to human rights,” they said.
The bottom line is that activists and students are worried, said Rosadino.
“People have either run out of energy or are scared or all of the above. People have lost the means to do a lot of the traditional activism that we’re used to doing,” he said.
UConn President Radenka Maric released a statement on Jan. 28 responding to the executive orders. Rosadino had a response of his own.
“UConn put out a statement saying they would protect students on campus. I wish I had more faith in the admin at our school. I don’t trust that anyone’s going to be fully protected. That’s just based on their track record of not listening to students when they were concerned about safety in the past. I don’t have full faith in them doing anything other than what they think they need to do to save face from angry parents and donors. There’s no way the admin is responding to students or doing anything preemptively in that regard,” Rosadino said.
He said if the administration was going to take steps to protect students, they would have done so already.
“If they really cared about protecting students, they’d be showing it,” said Rosadino.
Just like Srinath, Rosadino argued that the answer to all this anxiety lies nearby in the community.
“We need to build our own community in the lack of that sense of safety. We have to protect us. We have to create a community that is robust, bring people together and have the students be the barrier so we know that if ICE comes on campus and the University isn’t going to stop it, we’re going to stop it,” Rosadino said.