Monsy Alvarado, Staff Writer
Immigration officials have told an undocumented Rutgers University student who was brought to the United States as a child and later granted protection from deportation that she needs to report to their office in the coming weeks for an interview, a move that has raised concern among professors whose union has asked that the school declare itself a sanctuary for undocumented students.
The student, 21-year-old Carimer Andujar, is in her third year studying chemical engineering and has been an outspoken advocate for undocumented students.
On Tuesday night, members of the Rutgers American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers met to organize a plan to support the young woman, said Nat T. Bender, a union representative of the American Federation of Teachers, New Jersey. He could not provide specifics of what that support would entail, but the Rutgers’ union’s Facebook page said that the emergency meeting was to stop her “detention and deportation.”
“Whether ICE is targeting her out of bureaucratic error or because Carimer is an outspoken community activist, we don’t know, but we plan to mobilize the broadest defense of our friend and student who has been called in for an interview with an ICE deportation officer on May 9th,’’ the post reads
Andujar, who is president of UndocuRutgers, an organization whose mission is to help undocumented students at the university, could not be immediately reached for comment on Wednesday.
A spokesman from Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Wednesday they could not discuss anyone’s case.
Andujar is supposed to be protected from deportation under President Obama’s 2012 executive order known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The news of the interview request from ICE comes on the heels of news that a 23-year who received the same protections was deported from California to Mexico in February. Juan Manuel Montes was twice granted deportation protection under DACA, which can be renewed every two years. Montes has filed a lawsuit.
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