Earlier this semester, a guidance email was sent to students, faculty and staff about how to respond if federal immigration agents (ICE) were to come to campus. When an email lands in your inbox from university leadership, it can be easy to see a name on a signature line and not a person; a policy, and not a purpose. Provost Dr. Kenton Sparks, Vice President of Student Development Missy Bryant and Director of Public Safety Michael Bicking answered questions about where the guidelines are coming from and what they mean for our university, bridging policy with conversation and opening the table for discussion.
Eastern’s guidelines aren’t entirely out of character for a university; other nearby colleges such as the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr made public announcements about how their campuses would respond to ICE activity on campus. While there was no incident on Eastern’s campus to prompt the guidance email, national incidents were prompting questions from Eastern’s community, and so the administration decided to take a proactive approach.
“When you start to see things happening at other schools, even though we’re not an expected target due to our size and where we are, we began to ask whether or not we should put out a public statement,” Sparks said. “We decided to make a public statement, especially to help the students. It’s to help them answer the question ‘What do I do as a student?’ with a list.”
“Questions [were] coming up across higher education,” Bryant said. “We were starting to get questions from a combination of populations, including faculty, staff and students.” The guidance, she emphasized, was not a policy handed down from above but a response for a community that was already asking.
Michael Bicking, Director of Public Safety, was equally direct: “It’s in the news, and it’s an important topic particularly for some individuals. That’s why we responded as we did.” The department wanted to be helpful, not reactive; to send something that would actually inform rather than merely check a box. “We wanted to make sure that our correspondence was what we wanted it to be,” Bicking said, “and that it was the most informative.”
As for who was involved in writing it, the guidance was a collaborative effort. Bryant described it as “very much a leadership team approach.” Public Safety was central, the cabinet was involved and, crucially, Eastern’s outside legal counsel reviewed everything to ensure alignment with current federal law, which, as Bryant noted, is “ever-changing.”
Eastern already had protocols in place for federal agencies coming to campus. Background checks for alumni, employment verifications and document requests from federal agencies aren’t entirely new situations. What is new is the high possibility of immigration enforcement, and with it, the need to review and communicate existing protocol more broadly.
“The policy didn’t change in regard to our approach,” Bryant said. “Our guideline is that we would direct any federal agency to Public Safety first; we’re not just going to let them into a building without knowing what their intention is and what legal rights they have.”
The guidance asks students to do one thing above all else: call Public Safety and don’t engage. What does the guidance actually mean?
Bicking put it plainly: “Don’t engage. That’s where you get into trouble every time.” This isn’t about fear, it’s about letting trained professionals handle a situation that is, legally and procedurally, their domain. When a student engages an agent without knowing what documentation is being presented or what authority it carries, the situation can escalate tempers from both sides, Bicking said.
Students are not without recourse when confronted by agents. A student who cannot verify an agent’s documentation can legitimately say: I don’t have the authority to review anything. Let me call someone who does. Bicking confirmed “I don’t have the authority to review anything” is a legally sound response. Even a student who can verify documentation does not have the authority to let an agent into a building; Eastern is a private campus, not a public institution, and only proper Eastern authorities can grant federal access.
“We can say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t come here,’ we reserve that right because we are a private institution,” Bicking said. He gave the example of when the university exercised its right to close the campus entirely to outside visitors during COVID.
A helpful rule of thumb: any space that requires a key card for entry is a private space. Card access “ensures that those who have permission to enter and exit get [that access],” Bicking said. Residence hall hallways, private offices, and secured buildings fall into this category.
Public spaces, lobbies, open academic buildings and outdoor areas are accessible to anyone, including agents. But access to a space does not mean authority to act within it. That depends entirely on the documentation an agent carries.
Not all official documents are equal. Bicking, drawing on decades of law enforcement experience, including as a chief of police, broke down the key distinctions: a court-ordered warrant allows agents to enter private spaces; an administrative warrant signed by a Homeland Security official, not a court, does not grant access to private property; and a subpoena is a request for evidence, not for detaining a person. Public Safety officers are trained to identify these documents and escalate them appropriately. Students should not try to make these determinations themselves.
Public Safety officers are trained to recognize these documents and escalate them to Bicking or his associate director; together, they bring roughly 60 years of law enforcement experience to that assessment.
University officials will make sure that no student will be unlawfully detained. But, in the case of proper warrants, the university cannot stop immigration agents from detaining a student. Currently, Eastern does not have established “next-step” protocols for this situation.
Both Sparks and Bryant addressed this honestly, acknowledging what is known and what remains situational. The immediate steps would mirror what Eastern already does when a student is removed from campus for any urgent reason. “Our general practice is to reach out to an emergency contact,” Bryant said. Student Development would also work with professors to explain the student’s absence and request flexibility. “The likelihood is that if the student is reasonably legitimate here, they’re going to get out one way or another,” Sparks said. “And once they get out, the last thing they want is for them to have lost track of their work.”
Bryant was open that communication with the larger Eastern community would be situational, weighing individual privacy and protection against the community’s need to know. What she committed to was this: “If something like that did happen, those conversations [about sharing information] would at least be happening.”
In the midst of all these protocols and guidelines is Eastern’s mission as a Christ-centered university and commitment to embody “Faith, Reason and Justice.”
Sparks didn’t hesitate when asked how this guidance connects to Eastern’s mission. “The ministry of Jesus was very much about the law and being careful about when the law is hurting people,” he said. “Scripture tells us to protect and take care of the widows, the orphans and anyone who’s exposed. That’s what this policy tries to do.” Bryant echoed that from the Student Development side, saying, “We’re committed to providing an environment that values every individual person, where care and respect are at the forefront of everything we do.”
Eastern is not picking a fight with the law. It is insisting, as Sparks put it, on “ethical pursuits of the law” and refusing to let loyalty to systems crowd out loyalty to people.
If you have questions, concerns or fears you don’t have to hold them alone. Leadership said, plainly, that they want to hear from students.
“We’ll certainly work with students to figure it out,” Bryant said. “We might not immediately have the answer, but we will.”
