The time has come again to oppose racist political persecution
BY PROFESSORS JOSHUA CLOVER and SEETA CHAGANTI — jclover@ucdavis.ede,
If Donald Trump’s Jan. 29, 2025 executive order (EO) targeting non-citizen — and largely non-white — students with expedited deportation alarms us, it does not catch us unawares. It is not the first time Trump has leveled such a threat. In 2017, the White House issued orders interfering with higher education for non-citizens in various ways, including attempting to revoke Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and banning specific people from re-entering the country. Of particular concern in the previous round of orders was the fate of “dreamers,” undocumented childhood arrivals pursuing higher education.
During that first administration, UC Davis responded rapidly and assertively, for example by highlighting the AB540 Center and UnDocuAlly training. These provided not only support to students targeted by the presidential administration but also an opportunity for all people of conscience to think hard about the very meaning of terms like “documented” and “deserving.”
The UnDocuAlly trainers in that period urged attendees to challenge the distinctions cached within the category of documentlessness. Are the non-student siblings of college-enrolled “dreamers,” for example, less worthy of protection? These useful prods fell within an institutional defense that, if inevitably clanky, was in good faith, serious, spectrumatic, and in most practical senses, successful. Campus struggles aligned with popular mobilizations. The promised wave of deportations and exclusions was, for the most part, averted.
At this moment, we have yet to see such a contest. One thus has to look back and wonder: Did the more remote layer of university administration in 2017 honor those granular moments of political education, or, as seems more likely, were they happy to ride the wave of a liberal consensus about the need to protect the deserving, the striving, the productive? This possibility would explain why the university’s response to Trump’s most recent EO does not carry the urgency, vehemence and indignation that the previous iteration inspired.
The university no doubt considers it a riskier sell to propose that students presented as beyond the embrace of liberal priorities deserve protection. The available language of allyship and opportunity last time appealed to a liberal political subject, meant to line up behind the idea — an idea surely insufficient to the breadth and depth of their actual politics — that the dream in question was purely one of class mobility. This served to flatter the university while, among other things, separating these students from the subjects of the racist Muslim ban.
The political terrain of the most recent EO, however, is much rougher for being more explicit. This reality becomes clear in the EO’s accompanying “Fact Sheet,” which clarifies the aim to “[d]eport Hamas Sympathizers and Revoke Student Visas: ‘To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.’”
If we accepted that the current EO’s goal was truly to root out those international students explicitly sympathetic to Hamas, we would have to note that the United Nations enshrines the right of all occupied peoples to struggle for self-determination. If we suspected that this EO’s goal was more disingenuous to target the broader swath of people who believe that Palestine should be free, well, that is a basic premise of ethical life.
In understanding this order and our obligation to oppose it unhesitatingly, however, we would insist — against false distinctions that both the right-wing administration and the adherents to liberal democratic tenets might find useful — on the many and critical continuities of 2017. If that moment helped open many people’s minds to the idea that no one is illegal, then 2025 is the moment when we remind ourselves that the language of “infestation” used to describe a political ideology is a familiar racist dog whistle, and that this recent ban is no more and no less than the racism of the previous Muslim ban. A politicized racism? Yes, but all racism is political.
Moreover, the continuity of this racial-political animus belies the idea that anything started on Oct. 7, 2023, either in the politics of the Middle East or its policing in the United States. We also know, however, that the animus against pro-Palestinian students is a wedge. If UC Davis declines to oppose this EO, they assent to racialized persecution that is certain to expand. Every single indication on the record tells us this.
But if there are continuities with 2017 and an ongoing project of racialized political persecution, so are continuities of hope. Recalling the victories, the successful defenses, the campus solidarity and the airport actions, we know that we can win this one if we fight together. We can together push back against the capacity for the state to exclude students according to certain political beliefs along with their origins and the color of their skin — for freedom, for all.
Written by: Professors Joshua Clover and Seeta Chaganti — jclover@ucdavis.ede
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