Charges have been dropped against three students who protested a speaking engagement by Customs and Border Protection agents on their campus, but only because they “could face punishments if they’re found to have violated the university’s code of conduct,” the AP reported. The students chanted “murder patrol” outside a University of Arizona classroom, where the agents were addressing a student law enforcement club. “Other students later joined in the chants of ‘murder patrol’ as the agents walked out of the classroom and were followed to parking garage where they left in an SUV.”
The Arizona Republic reports that the agents didn’t bother to get names of the three students on that day, but “after the video spread among conservative media and social media accounts, the UA faced pressure to charge the students and cite them for violating the student code of conduct.” One of the students, Mariel Alexandra Bustamante, said she also believes the Border Patrol’s union was joining in the pressure.
This isn’t the first time students have fought against the presence of mass deportation agents on their campus. Last year, student-led pressure forced agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pull from a job fair at Rutgers University. "ICE's presence will most definitely disturb the Government and Public Service Career Fair by discouraging students who are concerned with their immigration status,” said one Dreamer.
According to documents spanning 2005 to 2017, the U.S. has paid more than $9 million to the families of at least 20 people who died at the hands of border agents since 2003, “in incidents including shooting, beating, use of Tasers and collisions with vehicles.” In January, a Border Patrol supervisor pleaded not guilty to killing four Texas women last year. And nearly a year later, we still don’t know all the answers behind the killing of Claudia Patricia Gómez González, an unarmed indigenous woman who was shot by agents in the Rio Bravo area of Texas.