Immigration, Fear, and Belonging in the Shadow of ICE: A Campus Conversation on Deportation

Reena Hamad, News Section Editor

Photo//Getty Images, Ron Jenkins

On October 7, 2025, the powerful roundtable “Mass Deportation, Our Communities, and Our Campus,” brought together faculty and community leaders to discuss how mass deportation, shifting immigration policies, and ICE encounters are affecting students, families, entire communities, and our own campus more than ever before. Co-moderated by Dr. Camron Amin and Dr. Maya Barak, the discussion featured faculty panelists Dr. Amy Brainer, and Dr. Michael MacDonald, alongside guest panelists Shahad Atiya, Kimberly Batchelor-Davis, and Eugenia Charles-Newton. 

Tracing the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s long history of engagement with international students, Dr. Amin, Professor of Middle East and Iranian Diaspora Studies, opened by emphasizing that international students have enriched, and been an integral part of our campus since its founding in 1959. Yet many students today live in fear of deportation and exclusion from academic life. Dr. Amin offered historical insight regarding the Iranian diaspora and how Iranian Americans, among other diasporic communities, have been treated in relation to U.S. foreign policy toward their country of origin, noting that “The number of Iranians coming to the U.S. seeking asylum grew as relations ruptured after the 1979 revolution. Today, we again see our Iranian-American students and colleagues facing uncertainty amid sanctions, travel bans, and mass deportations.”

Panelist Shahad Atiya, an immigration and criminal defense attorney, UM-Dearborn alumna, president of Atiya Law, and professor of Crimmigration on campus represents immigrants in matters of immigration, criminal, family, and business law as well as where those areas intersect. She shared firsthand experiences from inside these immigration court cases, noting that inflated immigration filing fees, inhumane ICE encounters, and self-deportations driven by fear, are all deeply affecting her clients every day. UM-Dearborn is fortunate enough to have her teaching a Crimmigration course (CRJ 417) this coming Winter 2026 term. 

Dr. Amy Brainer, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, discussed the intersection of gender identity and immigration, describing how LGBTQ+ identifying immigrants are consistently “criminalized, pathologized, and aggressively targeted for every aspect of their person.” She shed light on the way that transgender migrants are found to be detained longer, are more likely to be placed in solitary confinement, and face the highest rates of physical and sexual assault in custody. She also noted that LGBTQ+ identifying individuals who often voice their support for Palestine place an additional target on their back. 

Kimberly Batchelor-Davis, assistant director of alumni relations at the University of Detroit Mercy, recounted the story of a student of color that was mistreated at the Canadian border, underscoring how race compounds vulnerability. Eugenia Charles-Newton, a lawyer and politician serving on the Navajo Nation Council for the Shiprock district, described the degraded experiences that members of Native American communities frequently face, often stemming from widespread ignorance of their origins. She even shared a personal encounter in which she and her husband had to provide extensive documentation to ICE officers to prove that she “belonged” here. 

Dr. Michael MacDonald, Associate Professor of Composition & Rhetoric, reflected on his experience teaching first-year writing across disciplines, emphasizing the classroom as a rare space of inclusion for students from all academic disciplines. He highlighted the opportunity introductory composition courses provide to cultivate rhetorical and media-literacy skills among students at the very start of their academic journeys at UM-Dearborn. 

The roundtable made clear that the University of Michigan-Dearborn is not an exception to the national patterns of fear and exclusion. Francesco Javier Lopez, the director of the Office of International Affairs (OIA), reported that nearly two hundred admitted international students were unable to secure visas in time for the fall semester largely due to a consulate shutdown during one of their busiest seasons, bringing the incoming international class at UMD down by roughly 44 percent from the previous year. Here on our campus, the OIA advocates to university leadership on behalf of the international campus community and keeps them informed on what they can do amid federal changes. The OIA also prioritizes keeping students informed about steps they can take to safeguard themselves throughout their academic journey.

Dr. Brainer highlighted three principles for university action: protecting student protest and speech, providing truly intersectional support, and grounding advocacy in community expertise. As put by Dr. Amin, “There is a lot of heat on our streets and in our hearts, But we are confident that together we can bring some light” underscoring the importance of coming together and the integrity and commitment to diversity and inclusion.