Florida students challenge university partnerships with ICE

GAINESVILLE, Fla. Students across Florida are pressing universities to end cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement through marches, petitions, legal action and repeated appeals to administrators. Protests have taken place at 10 of the 12 university campuses whose administrators agreed last year to cooperate with ICE in stopping, questioning and sometimes detaining immigrants on campus.

Those campuses represent more than 400,000 students. Florida is the only state where university police departments participate in immigration enforcement partnerships. Administrators generally defend the arrangements as measures to protect their communities. FIU Police Chief Alexander Casas told PantherNOW that campus officers should handle immigration enforcement contacts because they know the university community and are accountable to it.

At Florida International University, seven students sued alongside the Florida ACLU after facing threatened enrollment holds and demands for apology videos over a silent protest on March 13. The students had worn shirts opposing ICE on campus at a university event, which administrators deemed disruptive. On August 23, a federal judge blocked punishment of the students and ruled that FIU could not prohibit expressive activities inside university buildings.

In Gainesville, at least 400 students, professors and residents joined a January 30 demonstration organized by the University of Florida’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter. Participants marched along West University Avenue as part of a national protest effort following the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good in Minneapolis. UF College Republicans counter-protested nearby, while student organizers criticized administrators for refusing dialogue.

That same day, more than 100 Florida State University students marched to the building housing President Richard McCullough’s office with a petition bearing 1,000 signatures against ICE cooperation. Organizers said administrators initially locked the doors, then promised a meeting that never happened. On February 5, another 100 students demonstrated outside the university police department until nightfall.

At the University of North Florida, student organizers protested a Customs and Border Patrol recruitment table two weeks after Good’s killing. Demonstrators remained for hours, displayed a large banner and distributed information about immigrants’ rights. Police officers were stationed near the recruitment table, and some passers-by joined the protest.

Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University students challenged gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds during a September 29 campus town hall. After Donalds said Florida would follow federal law on immigration, student organizer Jayla Jones pressed him on protecting students from ICE. Security escorted her outside. A subsequent meeting with Vice President of Student Affairs Bryan Smith produced no further meetings despite additional outreach, Jones said.

At the University of Central Florida, organizers are beginning weekly letter deliveries after protests and unsuccessful meetings with administrators. The campus Students for a Democratic Society chapter collected more than 100 letters in three days for delivery to the president’s office during the week of November 9. The group is also supporting two Orlando-area students detained by ICE and transferred to Texas, whom chapter president Grisha Glozman said were in the country legally.

More than 100 Florida Atlantic University students demonstrated on September 5, 2025, under a police presence that organizer Nicholas Ostheimer described as intimidating. Officers followed protesters using vehicles and bicycles and watched from rooftops. Members of the university’s Turning Point chapter held a counter-protest supporting ICE.

Demonstrations have also taken place at Florida Gulf Coast University, the University of South Florida and the University of West Florida. Alana Greer, director and co-founder of Miami’s Community Justice Project, said students have helped sustain opposition to the partnerships and resisted allowing the arrangements to become accepted as routine.