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  • Undocumented students in California navigate uncertainty and fear under Trump

    Undocumented students in California navigate uncertainty and fear under Trump


    Although attending and graduating from an American university is a great milestone for many undocumented students, it doesn’t eliminate their immigration status or fear for their livelihoods. 

    Mitzli Pavia Garcia, a 2024 San Diego State University graduate, remembers being 12 years old and running out of food and water on a three-day trek through the Arizona desert. Garcia and eight others attempted to cross the Mexico border into the United States for a month, turning back due to extreme weather or arrests. 

    Garcia and the group broke open cactuses to sip and prayed when they found a farm, taking gulps of water from the same trough as the cattle.

    Today, Garcia is a 28-year-old undocumented resident of the United States.

    Born in Cuautla, Mexico, Garcia was 6 years old when they first entered the United States. According to Garcia, their mom wanted to give them a life better than her own. Garcia’s mother never finished middle school, and their father did not complete elementary school.

    Garcia said they always navigate life aware of their immigration status. Struggling to keep up in high school while thinking about higher education, they recalled how colleges and financial aid programs required Social Security numbers to apply. And they worried about the record number of deportations during the Obama administration, which instilled fear in the undocumented community.

    “When I was in school, I knew that I was safe from immigration, so I loved learning,” Garcia said. “I was top of the class for some things, and it was really hard for me to push myself to do the best when I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to access higher education.”

    Garcia applied for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, hoping to receive security from the government as a student. Because Garcia and their mom had returned to Mexico to care for their grandmother before high school, their application was instantly rejected.

    The lack of security from DACA didn’t deter Garcia. 

    Garcia was accepted to San Diego State University in 2022 after attending San Diego Mesa and San Diego Miramar community colleges. 

    Garcia said undocumented students severely lacked support at SDSU. 

    “We have an undocumented resource center at San Diego State. It’s a great thing, but it’s the bare minimum,” Garcia said. “It’s a great space for undocumented students to go and sit, but it was hard for me to ask them for help because they don’t even have the resources.” 

    Garcia found more support from Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán, or MEChA, on campus. According to its website, MEChA is a national organization with local chapters that focus on Chicanx issues, including U.S. immigration and Central and South American political struggles.

    Garcia felt pressure even after graduating from a four-year university. They have been trying to achieve American citizenship, but have grown frustrated and worried about the lengthy process.

    “A lot of us still can’t legally work in the spaces that we worked so hard for four years because again, they require Social Security or legal status,” they said. “I submitted legal paperwork in 2020, then Covid hit. At the time, it was a five-year wait for the legal route that I was pursuing. It is now doubled, and now it’s a 10-year-plus wait. Trump keeps telling us, ‘Hey, do it the legal way,’ and then the legal way takes a quarter of your life.”

    Based on the legal proceedings he has completed, Garcia said, “I am not supposed to be deportable.” But they know, ICE “can hold me in a detention center if they want to, because they’re doing that now. They’re arresting citizens just because they’re brown, putting them in detention centers, and then not believing that they’re citizens, even with the paperwork. I don’t even feel safe to travel outside of San Diego, and when everything started happening a few weeks ago, I was afraid to leave my house.”

    Garcia finds strength in their undocumented identity, however.

    “We’ve feared this already before,” they said. “While they may be able to instill this fear in my community, I’m not going to let them instill that fear in me. I’m still here, I still made it out. We can still achieve our dreams.”

    By Roman Fong





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  • University of California won’t allow hiring of undocumented students

    University of California won’t allow hiring of undocumented students


    Immigrant students at UC and their allies rallied last spring in support of a proposal to allow the university to hire immigrant students who lack permission to be in the U.S.

    Michael Burke/EdSource

    This story has been updated with additional quotes.

    The University of California will not allow the hiring of undocumented students for jobs on its campuses, disappointing students who pushed for the right to be employed without legal status. 

    Allowing those students to work campus jobs would have been “the right thing to do” but presented too many legal risks and thus was “not viable,” said Michael Drake, the system’s president, while addressing UC’s board of regents Thursday.

    Drake cited several possible legal ramifications. He said the university could be “subject to civil fines, criminal penalties, or debarment from federal contracting,” while human resources staff could face prosecution if they “knowingly participate in hiring practices deemed impermissible under federal law.” He also suggested that undocumented students and their families could face prosecution or even deportation. 

    “I know that many in our community will be disappointed that we are unable to take immediate action. As an individual, I would like nothing more than to do so right here, right now, because it is the right thing to do,” he added. “However, we have a fiduciary responsibility to consider all possible ramifications of our actions.”

    The regents voted to suspend consideration of the policy for one year. Some regents against the motion said it could be even more difficult to implement the policy a year from now, alluding to the possibility that former President Donald Trump could be back in office.

    In not moving forward with the proposal, the regents “let us down today,” said Jeffry Umaña Muñoz, a UCLA undergraduate student and one of the undocumented students who organized the movement advocating for the proposal. There are more than 4,000 undocumented students across UC’s 10 campuses.

    “Our classmates can apply for any job on campus, helping them not only get by financially on a daily basis but also advancing their careers, while we remain forced to rely on incredibly limited resources,” he added in a statement. “I’m deeply disappointed that the UC Regents and President Drake shirked their duties to the students they are supposed to protect and support. We as UC students deserve so much more from our university leadership.”

    Several regents voted against the measure to suspend considering the policy: Keith Ellis, Jose Hernandez, John Pérez, Gregory Sarris, student regent Merhawi Tesfai and Tony Thurmond. Thurmond is an ex-officio member of the regents in his role as the state’s superintendent of public instruction. Ellis, an alumni regent, is also an ex-officio member.

    A coalition of undocumented students and legal scholars started urging UC more than a year ago to allow the hiring of undocumented students. They argued that UC is permitted to do so, saying the university as a state entity is exempt from a 1986 federal statute banning the hiring of immigrants without legal status.

    UC officials formally started studying the issue last spring. At that time, Pérez said it was the board’s intention to ultimately allow the hiring of undocumented students.

    Pérez said Thursday that he couldn’t “think of a moment where I’ve been more disappointed sitting around this board.” Pérez was appointed as a regent in 2014 and served a one-year term as chair of the board beginning in 2019.

    “We have gotten so focused on the question of what the law clearly says today, that we’re losing sight of the moral imperative of what the law should be interpreted as being,” he said. “Some of us may discount the analysis by some of our greatest legal scholars and suggest that it is just an academic exercise on what is legally permissible. But if we don’t challenge, if we don’t push, we won’t know.”

    The regents’ decision Thursday comes after Politico reported Wednesday that officials in President Joe Biden’s administration privately opposed the proposal and warned UC of possible legal ramifications, even threatening that the administration could sue. 

    In response to a question from EdSource seeking confirmation of the Politico report, a UC spokesperson said the university “regularly engages with local, state, and federal partners on numerous issues concerning public education and for maintaining compliance with existing federal law.” The spokesperson added, though, that UC “will not characterize the nature of those discussions.”





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  • California colleges agree on how to interpret in-state tuition law for undocumented students

    California colleges agree on how to interpret in-state tuition law for undocumented students


    California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

    Credit: Ashley Bolter / EdSource

    Este artículo está disponible en Español. Léelo en español.

    More than 20 years ago, California passed a law allowing some undocumented immigrant students to attend college with in-state tuition, if they meet certain requirements.

    But immigrant rights advocates say many students who should have been eligible have been wrongfully denied in-state tuition because of confusion over requirements, misinformation and different interpretations of the law at different college campuses.

    “We lose that incredible brain power and colleges are losing enrollment,” said Nancy Jodaitis, director of higher education for Immigrants Rising, a nonprofit organization that advocates for undocumented people to achieve educational and career goals.

    Immigrants Rising brought together officials from all three public college systems — California Community Colleges, California State University and University of California — to discuss and agree on answers to frequently-asked questions about the law.

    The result is a document called the Systemwide AB 540 FAQ, which all three systems have now signed. The document includes answers to 59 questions, such as:

    • What if a student graduated from a California high school (completing three years’ worth of high school credits), but did not attend three years at a California high school?
    • Does a student have to take classes full time for their attendance to count?
    • Does all their coursework have to be taken at the same school?

    Spokespeople from UC, CSU and California Community Colleges all celebrated the document.

    Paul Feist, vice chancellor of communications and marketing for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, said the document is particularly important because there are several different laws regarding the nonresident tuition exemption.

    The first bill exempting some undocumented immigrants from out-of-state tuition, Assembly Bill 540, was signed into law in 2001. Since then, three other bills have been passed to expand the law, in 2014, 2017 and 2022.

    “While the intent was to expand access to AB 540 financial assistance, they had the unintended effect of making it more difficult to navigate,” Feist said. “This FAQ is designed to provide clearer explanations and provide additional resources in advising students.”

    Under current California law, students who are undocumented or have temporary protection from deportation such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), or who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, are eligible for in-state tuition and state financial aid, if they attended at least three years of high school, adult school or community college in California and obtained a high school diploma or equivalent, an associate degree or fulfilled the minimum requirements to transfer to a UC or CSU. 

    Access to state financial aid and in-state tuition can be a critical factor for undocumented students, who are barred from receiving federal financial aid. Without the law in place, some of them would be charged tuition rates for international students, often much higher than in-state tuition.

    “This is huge,” said Maria Gutierrez, a college counselor at Chabot College in Hayward and a doctoral student at San Francisco State University. “It helps us be aligned and have something in writing.”  Before the FAQ document, Gutierrez says college staff in charge of approving exemptions from out-of-state tuition were sometimes afraid to make decisions without written proof of how to interpret the law.

    Gutierrez herself has benefited from AB 540. She came to the U.S. when she was 5 years old on a visa, which later expired. She attended elementary, middle and most of high school in California. She also graduated from high school in California. But when she applied to attend community college in California, different campuses disagreed on whether she was eligible for in-state tuition because she had spent two years of high school in Utah. At the time, a second law had recently been passed to allow colleges to consider years of attendance in elementary and middle school for AB 540 eligibility.

    “One college that I went to in So Cal, I was approved for AB 540. When I had to go back to the Bay Area, I was not approved for AB 540. So then I was confused that there was this inconsistency,” Gutierrez said.

    A few years later, when she applied to transfer to a four-year college, both UC and CSU campuses told her she was not eligible for in-state tuition, even though by then, a law had passed that clarified that attendance at community college could be counted toward the requirements. She spent a semester paying out-of-state tuition at San Jose State University, before the university finally acknowledged she was legally eligible for in-state tuition. 

    As a college counselor, Gutierrez continues to meet students who have been incorrectly told they are not eligible for in-state tuition.

    “It’s crazy because in reality it hasn’t changed much,” she said. However, she said, the financial burden is harder now, because most students graduating from high school cannot apply for work permits under DACA, because the government has not accepted new applications since 2017. 

    “I see my students now and I see the struggles they’re going through. If I didn’t have DACA, I honestly don’t think I would be where I am now,” Gutierrez said. “There’s no way that I would’ve been able to pay nonresident fees or wait for whoever it is that is determining that to learn what they need to do for me to be able to go to college.”

    Advocates say they hope the document will help colleges give correct information and avoid students having to research on their own for information.

    California also recently streamlined the process for undocumented students to apply for financial aid and exemption from in-state tuition on the same application when they fill out the California Dream Act application. In the past, students had to both fill out a California Dream Act application and an AB 540 affidavit form for each college. Now, the AB 540 form will be part of the same application.

    Diana Aguilar-Cruz said that change is significant. Aguilar-Cruz is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public health at Cal State Fullerton. When she first began her undergraduate education at Cal Poly Pomona, she was charged nonresident tuition, which was almost double the in-state tuition. She had immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico City in 2015, when she was 14 years old, and lived with her grandmother in Baldwin Park while attending high school. 

    She had completed a California Dream Act application, but no one told her she also had to complete a separate form. After researching it herself online, she found the form and completed it, at which point the university finally changed her tuition to in-state.

    “If I didn’t find it in my Google search, would I be paying in-state tuition for my four years of college?” Aguilar-Cruz said. “I always think to myself, what would have happened if I was a more fearful student or a student who did not have a strong support system at home?”

    This article was corrected to clarify how Maria Gutierrez immigrated to the U.S. and that Chabot College is in Hayward.





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  • If undocumented parents lose Medi-Cal, California kids could suffer, advocates say

    If undocumented parents lose Medi-Cal, California kids could suffer, advocates say


    A family gets information at Fort Miller Middle School’s Health and Wellness Fair in Fresno.

    Photo courtesy of Eric Calderon-Phangrath

    Children’s health advocates are sounding alarm bells about Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to freeze public health insurance enrollment for undocumented adults. 

    They say the move will put those adults’ children at risk of poor health care and well-being.

    California has gradually expanded Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance for low-income people, to undocumented immigrants, including those with temporary status such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. First, undocumented children were included in 2016, then young adults 19-25 in 2019, then seniors 50 and older in 2022, and finally those ages 26-49 in January 2024.

    Before the expansion, undocumented immigrants only qualified for Medi-Cal in emergencies, during pregnancy, and for long-term care. California is paying for the expansion on its own, without federal dollars.

    Now, faced with a deficit, Newsom is proposing to freeze new enrollment in Medi-Cal for undocumented immigrant adults and charge current undocumented enrollees a $100 monthly premium starting in 2027.

    The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been pressuring states like California to stop providing benefits to undocumented immigrants, saying tax dollars should not be used for people who are in the country without permission.

    In announcing the proposed cuts, though, Newsom said they were to balance the budget. He said his beliefs have not changed. He touted his promises to expand health care to all, regardless of immigration status, both as mayor of San Francisco and governor of California.

    “It’s my value. It’s what I believe, I hold dear. I believe it’s a universal right. And I have for six years championed that,” Newsom said. “This is a tough budget in that respect.”

    He said there are now 1.6 million undocumented adults enrolled in Medi-Cal, about 5.3% of total enrollment.

    “Our approach was not to kick people off and not to roll back the expansion, but to level set on what we can do and what we can’t do,” Newsom said.

    Though undocumented children would not be affected directly by the changes, advocates say that restricting health insurance for undocumented adults will affect their children, the vast majority of whom are U.S. citizens. An estimated 1 in 10 California children have at least one parent who is “undocumented” or has temporary protections from deportation, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.

    “We are disheartened,” wrote Avo Makdessian, executive director of the First 5 Association of California, an organization that represents the state’s county commissions supporting children in the first five years of life, in a statement released after Newsom’s announcement of his revised budget. “When Medi-Cal coverage is scaled back for adults without legal status, children in those families suffer. Decades of research are clear: Healthy parents lead to healthy kids.”

    Ted Lempert, president of the nonprofit organization Children Now, said, “Children Now is deeply concerned with the proposed cuts to Medi-Cal.”

    “We urge the governor and Legislature to consider that when parents lose coverage, kids are less likely to get the health care they need, so the proposal to hurt parents hurts kids as well,” Lempert said.

    Mayra Alvarez, president of The Children’s Partnership, an organization that advocates for children’s health equity, said studies show that when parents become eligible for Medi-Cal, they are more likely to learn about health insurance options available to their children and enroll them.

    “This ‘welcome mat’ effect can lead to a noticeable increase in the number of children covered by Medi-Cal or similar programs, even without changes in their individual eligibility,” Alvarez said. “Conversely, when a parent or family member is sick and unable to work or provide care, kids suffer as a result.”

    Dolores, 65, is a grandmother who enrolled in Medi-Cal under the expansion for undocumented immigrants. She said losing it would affect not only her but also her children and grandchildren. She did not share her last name because of fear of immigration enforcement.

    Months after enrolling three years ago, Dolores suffered a stroke. 

    “If I hadn’t had Medi-Cal, I don’t know how I would have gotten health care,” she said in Spanish. “It helped me then, and it is still helping me so much.”

    Her enrollment in Medi-Cal has also helped her family, including her grandchildren, who live with her, she said. At a health center in Victorville, she has been able to take nutrition classes and Zumba, and she has learned about healthy foods to cook for her family. She said her 4-year-old granddaughter follows her every move, exercises with her, and has benefited from her grandma’s improved health.

    “You know children are like sponges — everything they see, they absorb,” she said. 

    Dolores said she could not afford to pay $100 a month for Medi-Cal, as proposed by Newsom. She has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years, but after the stroke, she has not been able to return to work.

    Alvarez added that when state residents are uninsured, that creates other costs in emergency health care.

    “Cynically discriminating against our state’s immigrant communities by rolling back Medi-Cal eligibility is not only unconscionable, but doing so will only result in costs being shifted elsewhere,” she said.

    Alvarez recommended that the governor and Legislature balance the budget in other ways, such as “closing corporate tax loopholes and making the wealthy pay their fair share, drawing down reserves that exist for times like this, and scaling back spending in more appropriate places, such as the state’s bloated prison budget.”





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  • Q&A: Big drop in enrollment of low-income undocumented students at California’s public universities

    Q&A: Big drop in enrollment of low-income undocumented students at California’s public universities


    People rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 as oral arguments are heard in the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to end the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The University of California brought the case to the court.

    Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

    The number of low-income undocumented students newly enrolled in the University of California and California State University plummeted 50% between 2016-17 and 2022-23, according to a study released this month.

    The study by William C. Kidder of the UCLA Civil Rights Project and Kevin R. Johnson of the UC Davis School of Law comes at a moment of heightened debate about policy proposals aimed at defraying the cost of college for undocumented students, who are not eligible for federal Pell Grants and often lack legal work permits. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed Assembly Bill 2586, which would have cleared the way for undocumented students to take on-campus jobs at the state’s public colleges and universities.

    “Given the gravity of the potential consequences of this bill, which include potential criminal and civil liability for state employees, it is critical that the courts address the legality of such a policy and the novel legal theory behind this legislation before proceeding,” Newsom wrote in his veto statement. “Seeking declaratory relief in court — an option available to the University of California — would provide such clarity.”

    Johnson wrote in an email that Newsom’s veto of AB 2586, also called the Opportunity for All Act, “will make it more difficult for undocumented students to attend public universities in California.” 

    “I hope that the University of California and California State University systems will consider ways to help financially support undocumented students,” he wrote. “Scholarships, fee remissions, and the like must be considered if lawful employment, as would have been permitted by the Opportunity for All Act, is not possible.”

    Since 2012, the federal program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, has allowed certain undocumented immigrants to temporarily work legally in the U.S. and live without fear of immediate deportation, but the program has ceased processing new applicants due to legal challenges.

    “When we think that we’re seeing a decrease in enrollment in California, CSU and UC, with all the support provided by the university and by the legislature in terms of allowing undocumented students to pay resident fees, you have to imagine that in other states it’s much worse in terms of drop off in enrollment of undocumented students,” Johnson wrote.

    Johnson and Kidder’s study seeks to fill an important gap in California policymakers’ understanding of how undocumented student enrollment has changed over time. 

    The state’s colleges and universities historically have avoided collecting official data on undocumented students, mindful of those students’ vulnerable legal status. To solve that problem, Kidder and Johnson examined the number of students awarded a Cal Grant under the California Dream Act, a state financial aid program for which low-income undocumented students are eligible. The numbers likely represent a subset of all undocumented college students at Cal State and UC campuses, since they do not include students who applied for a Dream Act award but were not eligible or who were offered an award but didn’t accept it.

    Kidder and Johnson find that Dream Act awardees at CSU and UC appear to have peaked around the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

    At CSU, they found that new and returning Dream Act awardees fell 30% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, outpacing an almost 7% decline in other Cal Grant awardees at CSU during the same period, as well as falling undergraduate enrollment within the university system.

    The story was similar at UC campuses, where Dream Act awardees dropped by roughly 31% between 2019-20 and 2022-23, a period in which other Cal Grant awardees only dipped 1%.

    Kidder and Johnson tie the decline in Dream Act awardees to the demise of the deferred action program. The Trump administration moved to rescind the program in 2017, and subsequent efforts to revive it have been stymied by court decisions that allow current DACA recipients to renew work permits but block new applicants. As a result, most current undergraduate college students are not eligible to apply for DACA and the youngest current DACA recipients are about 22 years old.

    That said, the study does not use the kind of granular data that would allow the researchers to test explicitly whether the rescission of DACA is causing the decline in Dream Act awardees. Previous research has found that the program boosted graduation rates among undocumented high school students and that harsher immigration enforcement correlated with lower academic achievement for undocumented K-12 students. Kidder and Johnson cite those studies — as well as the similar results they observed across UC and CSU — as pointing toward the likelihood that an external force is behind declining Dream Act awardees. 

    Supporters of AB 2586, the bill Newsom vetoed this weekend, argued that the UC system is not subject to a federal prohibition on hiring undocumented workers because it is part of the state of California. Johnson is among 29 scholars to sign a legal memo building that case, which was published by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

    Neither CSU nor UC took a formal position on the bill. But in a letter to lawmakers, the UC expressed concerns that hiring undocumented students could jeopardize “billions of dollars in existing federal contracts and grants.” The university system also said the bill could expose students, their families and UC employees to criminal or civil prosecution. In July, CSU officials similarly said the bill rested on an untested legal theory that could result in litigation against the system. 

    EdSource recently spoke with Kidder and Johnson to discuss their forthcoming article in the Journal of College & University Law. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    What do we understand about the impact that DACA had on undocumented high school students, and what has happened since the Trump administration began challenging the Obama-era program?

    Johnson: The data that we were able to put together shows that, basically, the dismantling of DACA —-the refusal to accept new applications – is having an impact that one might expect. While DACA created some kind of stability, initially, in high school students and boosted college enrollments, its dismantling has had the effect of reducing undocumented enrollment and destabilizing students and, the way I’d put it, it’s making them wonder whether they have a future in this country. …

    It’s a wake-up call in all kinds of ways for colleges and universities to claim that they want to be open, be more accessible.

    What did you find when you looked at how many students at Cal State and University of California campuses received California Dream Act grants in recent years?

    Kidder: New California Dream Act awardees, both freshmen and students, had declined by half between 2017 and 2023, which is just a remarkable drop. … I was a little surprised at the scale of the decline, just given the situation in California and how it’s different from Texas or Florida or some other states where there’s greater opposition and hostility to supporting undocumented students.

    Do you see the same pattern of decline in awards among California residents who are citizens and who received Cal Grants during this period?

    Kidder: We tried to adopt what social scientists call a “difference in difference” methodology. That’s where you study the rate of change over time with one group compared to a matched comparison group. 

    So, we looked at low-income students who are not undocumented, primarily U.S. citizen residents of California — who are going to the same high schools; the same age group; similar, but not exactly the same, income levels; very similar academic profiles in terms of high school GPAs, etc. We did that to confirm that there weren’t other systemic effects on the California budget and economy that might be unaccounted for outside factors. 

    What we found is that other Cal Grant students, both within UC and within CSU, were flat at the same time that both the undocumented students at UC and CSU had this 50% decline. So it did shore up our inference that there was something uniquely challenging in the current environment for undocumented college students.

    You write that back in the 2016-17 school year, 56% of new Dream Act students attended a UC or Cal State campus, while the remainder attended a California Community College campus. By the 2022-23 school year, that dynamic had flipped: 40% of those Dream Act students attended UC and Cal State, and the rest attended community college. What do you make of that shift?

    Kidder: We did include in the data that we are capturing not just new freshmen, but also new entering transfer students. It is of concern that somehow, in recent years … it’s not translating into those (community college) students still having higher education access to a university education through the transfer pathway. There’s a blockage there, and that was clear in the data. 

    From a public policy level, that’s troubling, given that these are students, many of whom have been living in California since age 5 or age 8, and the California taxpayers and the system of California laws has invested in their future. For those students to be blocked in their pathway lowers their future life chances. 

    State university officials can’t control what happens with DACA. If educators at UC and Cal State are concerned about losing undocumented students, what could they do to encourage those students to enroll and help them to stay enrolled?

    Johnson: I think one of the assumptions in the question is that there’s limited possibilities for what the university could do. It was the University of California that brought the lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court stopping the rescission of DACA, and that was a controversial move in some quarters. But I do think the university– legally, politically and otherwise — is a powerful advocate for students, and can and has, at various times, pushed for reform and change. 

    I think that the university, if they’re really committed to undocumented students, can support things like the Opportunity for All Act, which has been basically briefed and set on their desk, showing that it might be legal for the University of California to allow its students, all students, to be employed by the University of California. …

    I think that the university could also think about, “How do we create more scholarships and funding for undocumented students?” If we’re really designing, or we really want to have, a university that serves all, shouldn’t we commit ourselves to enrolling all students who we admit and making it possible for them to attend? 

    Then the question is, how you raise money, how you distribute that money, how you create scholarships. The University of California often takes great pride in bringing in large chunks of money for research projects and, for example, spends years talking about and invests mounds of money in Aggie Square in Sacramento for research. … Why not work to create more funding for all students, including undocumented students? Why not think carefully about your tuition increases at various points in time, and what impacts it has on the people that you say you want to enroll in the university?

    I want to talk to you about AB 2586. The first Cal State board of trustees meeting I attended was in July, and there was some discussion about this bill. The trustees were asking staff to brief them on what they think of this bill. The gist was, ‘We see this as risky. We see this as potentially putting us on a collision course with the federal government, where we would open ourselves up to litigation. What do you think about that approach?

    Johnson: I think it’s a cowardly approach. It’d be like the university saying “We’re not going to weigh in on the civil rights movement because it’s controversial politically, and it’s risky to do so, and we’re not going to move forward because we’re afraid of getting sued.” 

    It’s funny, but (former UC President) Janet Napolitano could have taken the same position, saying “We’re not going to challenge the rescission of DACA, don’t want to alienate the federal government, which gives a large amount of money to the University of California. We’re just going to sit on our hands and let these DACA recipients be poorly treated.” …

    I’m an attorney. I was dean of the (UC Davis School of Law) for 16 years. Attorneys are always going to tell you there are risks. There are also risks driving to the grocery store, but we still go to the store. So I don’t buy that risk assessment argument, and I think that this is the time for universities that are truly committed to these issues to show their commitment to these issues.

    Why should CSU and why should the UC prioritize helping undocumented students to get a college degree?

    Kidder: Both my data analysis as well as my personal experience as a university administrator working with lots of undocumented students confirms my conviction that this is a very talented pool of young people in California. If their hopes and dreams are allowed to flourish in California, it benefits all Californians, and I mean that both in an economic sense and in a larger democratic sense.





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