Last weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate, for participating in campus protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Khalil, a permanent resident of the U.S., was handcuffed in front of his pregnant wife by two men who followed him into his apartment. He was charged with no crime, no warrant was shown to his lawyer and he has been transferred to an ICE processing center in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles away from his home.

Yale cannot allow Trump’s abductions to happen in New Haven. University leaders must take steps to protect Yale students, staff and community members before it is too late. Here are some steps it should take.

First, University President Maurie McInnis should pledge that Yale will never voluntarily share student disciplinary records with the federal government. If subpoenas for those records are issued, Yale should fight against them with every legal tool available. It should also bar federal immigration authorities from entering campus — the University’s private property and thus protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions on unreasonable search and seizure — if their purpose is to seek information about or access to immigrant students and they do not have probable cause or a warrant. Trump has vowed to deport or arrest student protesters. If Yale helps Trump arrest or compile a hit list of its own students, it will not only be complicit in his assault on democracy but also betray its academic mission. 

Second, Yale should provide legal advice and representation and personal support to any community member who is being targeted or surveilled — whether by the government or individuals trying to ‘dox’ them. Campus-wide policies against doxxing, modeled after those at Stanford and Cornell, should be introduced as soon as possible. No one should be allowed to publicize identifying information about a student for engaging in political speech, knowing that it could lead to their arrest or deportation. President McInnis should also ensure that the Office of International Students and Scholars has the resources and funding it needs to support any community members who are particularly at-risk.

Third, Yale should pledge not to ban masks on campus and not to surveil students engaged in peaceful political speech. At Harvard, administrators have recorded the ID numbers of student protesters. Yale should never do the same. Students should not have to fear extreme retribution for exercising their right to protest. Protests are often disruptive, but they are a freedom that universities exist to defend. Yale should take every possible measure to do so.

Fourth, President McInnis should publicly demand the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and an end to the deportation and arrest of student protesters. While Yale might be afraid of inviting retribution by speaking out, appeasement won’t save it from Trump. Columbia has suspended and expelled numerous student protestors; in return Trump still stripped $400 million of its federal funding. Yale should offer an alternative vision for how American universities can fight back. Instead of being silent, President McInnis should work with other university leaders and get them to commit to similar policies — anti-doxxing, anti-surveillance, litigation and legal support — that will protect student speech across the board. To resist the intimidation Trump’s funding freezes are meant to cause, Yale and other wealthy schools should agree to share their private resources with those that have smaller endowments and will suffer the most from losing government money. 

Fifth, and perhaps most important, Yale should reassess its institutional behavior. Trump’s persecution of American universities has been slowly enabled by the decisions of schools like Yale, which policymakers and the public pay attention to. When the Board of Trustees condones war crimes by refusing divestment, orders the arrests of student protesters, meets behind closed doors, seals its meeting minutes for 50 years and ignores the results of campus referendums, it sends the world a message: Yale University doesn’t care about human rights or democracy. In doing so, the Board of Trustees undermines the very conditions necessary for Yale’s existence. Liberal values like free speech and open discourse are anathema to authoritarians like Trump; free universities cannot exist in unfree societies. For Yale to pursue its mission of “improving the world through scholarship,” it must stand up to Donald Trump. President McInnis and the Board of Trustees must act.

ARJUN WARRIOR is a junior in Timothy Dwight College majoring in History. He can be reached at arjun.warrior@yale.edu.