**We are requesting just SUNY Geneseo students, staff, and faculty to sign to show our immediate support for changes on our campus**

On 2/6/26, I (a student at SUNY Geneseo) noticed US Customs and Border Patrol had responded to attend our SUNY Geneseo March 26th Job and Internship Fair. This is a job fair individual job vendors invite themselves to, and we are asking SUNY Geneseo to provide a solution to remove their presence from the job fair.

We, SUNY Geneseo students, are concerned and asking for action in two parts. First, that the presence of US Customs and Border Patrol will restrict educational and career access to students who may feel unsafe appearing at an event that could help them secure employment. This prompts our call for their removal from the campus fair. But second, this event is also a reminder that we need more protection from US Customs and Border Patrol and their interconnected agency—ICE—on our campus, to ensure we all feel safe in our educational pursuits. This prompts our call to become a sanctuary campus and do everything within our power to protect students.

This past year, we have seen ICE’s violent actions take lives--Renee Good's​, Alex Pretti's​, Keith Porter's​, 32 recorded deaths of people detained in 2025​, 8 recorded deaths of people detained in 2026, and recently the indirect and avoidable death of Linda Davis. We have seen the Supreme Court uphold the systemic racial profiling ICE agents are using to detain people, such as type of employment, speaking Spanish, speaking English with an accent, race, and ethnicity. This ruling has left us with a collection of stories of individuals targeted, injured, and emotionally shaken by ICE and communities systemically profiled. This hate, violence, and vitriol directly threatens our commitment to being an equity-centered honors college, where student’s right to an education, employment, and to feeling safe should be secured.

While US Customs and Border Patrol is not ICE, their close link housed under the Department of Homeland Security is inextricably connected. These organizations work together, with US Customs and Border Patrol being present at immigration raids, specifically at the shooting of Alex Pretti. As such, we are advocating for both organizations to be restricted from our campus communities, for their violence and aggression has no place in our community. SUNY Geneseo’s mission statement iterates our commitment to belonging and civic engagement, and the presence of either of these organizations staunches our ability to promote “equity and inclusion” and goes directly against our “ethical commitment to the common good of our local and global communities.” 

Outside of the specific SUNY Geneseo job fair and the concern of US Customs and Border Patrol’s presence, our second demand is we are asking for a SUNY-wide preventive step forward. We are asking for SUNY Geneseo to be allowed to become a sanctuary campus, to greater protect our students at an administrative level. We are asking for our SUNY schools to make individual decisions on the ability to restrict ICE and US Customs and Border Patrol’s access to our campuses’ public spaces. We are asking to remove their presence at an employment fair, limiting students’ ability to engage with these career services for fear of the violence we’ve seen these past years. We are asking to restrict their ability to engage with our campus community, limit their ability to access our student spaces, and ensure that our campus is truly safe and accessible for all students. We are asking for SUNY policy to allow our campuses to make decisions to protect our well-being, our ability to access the education we are all here for, and to allow us all to access the simple right of feeling safe in our second homes. And we are asking for SUNY policy to reflect the vital need to protect us as students, our right to an education, and our right to safety.

This is a time for action. I know we are all busy, I know we have a thousand assignments and obligations, jobs and responsibilities. But I am asking you to sign this petition with your support, and then to stay active in our community—to protect our community. We will post updates in our process on this petition to our Instagram page (@iceoutgeneseo), but we ask you to follow this progress, to ensure that we keep us safe. We can do this, as a community, and we will. Stay active, stay engaged, stay together. We keep us safe.