Michigan student activists convene in Detroit for conference, demand every MI school be a sanctuary campus
Michigan chapters of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) came together in Detroit at Wayne State University on Saturday, February 28, for their first statewide organizing conference.
The one-day conference featured panels and workshops, mostly revolving around their Sanctuary Campus campaigns, which demand university administrators never collaborate with federal immigration enforcement, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in particular.
“As we’re seeing the level of attacks by ICE rise in Michigan, with the repeated kidnapping of high school and college students, we in the student movement saw the need to raise our level of organization to fight back. This conference laid the groundwork for that in a real way; we can build SDS at new schools, colleges and universities,” said Jackson Robak, an organizer with Wayne State University SDS
The organizations present at the conference included the SDS chapters from Wayne State University, Central Michigan University, Grand Valley State University, as well as the Detroit Community Action Committee and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
The SDS chapters passed a resolution calling for the formation of a statewide student network. The network will call coordinated days of action, where students at universities across the state coordinate protests for their Sanctuary Campus campaigns. Further, the network will organize protests at Michigan universities which don’t have SDS chapters, when students at those universities are detained by federal immigration enforcement, or when federal immigration enforcement enters campus.
The conference concluded with a protest on Wayne State campus, the focus of which was on Sanctuary Campus campaigns, demanding “every school in Michigan a sanctuary.” Students and community members also spoke out at the rally against U.S. airstrikes against Iran.