Students at Stanford University, an elite private institution in Silicon Valley that costs $47,940 per year to attend, marched Tuesday to demand that the lush Palo Alto grounds be turned into a “sanctuary campus” to shelter illegal aliens facing deportation under President Donald Trump.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
More than 500 Stanford University students, faculty and staff members walked out of classrooms and ducked out of jobs Tuesday in a protest of the policies of Donald Trump, the latest in a wave of Bay Area and national demonstrations against the president-elect.
Some of the Stanford dissidents, though, came with a concrete demand for the university’s administrators: investigating the possibility of the South Bay campus serving as a sanctuary against the sort of millions of deportations Trump has said he’ll seek as president.
Hundreds of people — students, faculty, staff and other supporters — had as of Tuesday evening signed an open letter addressed to President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost John Etchemendy urging the two leaders to “immediately develop a protocol for making itself a sanctuary campus.”
Stanford University spokesperson Lisa Lapin told the Chronicle that the walkout had the “full support” of the university administration, but would not speculate about policies toward illegal aliens.
Students at other elite universities have made similar demands, though it is not clear how or where illegal aliens would be housed. A letter from left-wing students at Yale to their university’s administration seems to describe a “sanctuary campus” as a kind of refugee camp for illegal aliens:
In the wake of the recent Presidential election, we — the undersigned students, faculty, and workers — urge you to take immediate steps to make Yale University a sanctuary campus for students, staff, and their family members who face deportation under President-elect Donald J. Trump’s proposed policies.
…
Given that many students and their family members now live in fear of Donald Trump’s deportation threats, we call upon the University to immediately develop a protocol for making itself a sanctuary campus. Yale has promised to be a home for all of us. A home is supposed to be safe. We owe it to the most vulnerable members of our community to do our utmost.
If we do nothing, then our stated commitments to diversity, justice, and inclusion will reveal themselves to be empty promises and hypocritical lies. At this moment, we cannot afford silence.
Since Election Day, several major cities in California and across the nation have vowed to continue to continue as “sanctuary cities” — that is, to defy federal immigration law and resist deportations of illegal aliens.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.