At a meeting on April 6, the Swarthmore Borough Council unanimously passed a resolution (No. 25-2026) establishing sanctuary protections and welcoming policies in the municipality, effective immediately.
Responding to reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in Delaware County, the state of Pennsylvania, and nationwide, the resolution outlined several measures, including a stipulation that the Swarthmore Police Department will not enter into a 287(g) agreement, which delegates “specified immigration officer duties” to local law enforcement; that the Borough will not authorize federal immigration enforcement to access its property and resources without legal authority; and that Swarthmore police officers “have a duty to prevent or stop unlawful conduct or serious policy violations by any law enforcement official,” including “excessive force, harassment, and bias-based policing.” Several Swarthmore students were present and spoke in support of the proposal during public comment.
Prior to the council meeting, a coalition of seven Swarthmore student organizations hosted “No ICE Week” in collaboration with Drexel students and No ICE Philly. The series of events took place from March 29 to April 4, featuring daily tabling at the Dining and Community Commons, teach-ins (titled “ICE x IOF” and “Palestine 101”), a film screening, and a petition backing the Borough resolution. The events concluded with a rally at Parrish Steps on Friday, April 4, where student organizers outlined their demands for the college, delivered speeches about global structural violence that both produces and penalizes immigrants, and facilitated petition signing.
“At its core, the week was about turning fragmented experience into shared analysis, and shared analysis into material action,” Clara Ximena Villalba ’26, a member of Swatties for Immigrant Rights (SIR) and ENLACE, wrote in a statement to Voices and The Phoenix.
Student Demands Regarding Sanctuary
During the rally on Friday, student organizers announced several demands to the college:
- Swarthmore College will reinforce a formal non-cooperation policy prohibiting any sharing of student, faculty, or staff information with ICE or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) without a judicial warrant.
- Swarthmore will guarantee that no campus space, including residence halls, classrooms, or administrative buildings, may be accessed by ICE or DHS agents without a signed warrant and prior review by college legal counsel.
- Swarthmore will publicly release an annual transparency report detailing any requests, contacts, or attempted actions by ICE or DHS involving the college.
- Swarthmore will provide know-your-rights training for all students, faculty, and staff at the start of each academic year.
- Swarthmore will refuse contracts, partnerships, or investments connected to private detention centers or companies that collaborate with ICE.
- Swarthmore leadership will issue a public, unequivocal statement condemning the actions and harms of ICE enforcement practices and affirming the college’s commitment to protecting undocumented community members.
- Swarthmore will advocate at the local, state, and federal level for policies that protect undocumented students, including tuition equity and pathways to legal status.
In email correspondence with The Phoenix, Lee Smithey, a member of the Sanctuary Committee and professor of peace and conflict studies, said some faculty members on the Sanctuary Committee were at the rally to hear SIR present these demands. Smithey noted that the Committee has been providing housing to students experiencing challenges re-entering the U.S. and supporting students’ “access to legal information and training about how to plan for emergencies, including encounters with immigration law enforcement.”
In response to the demands from student organizers, Smithey noted that the first one has already been in effect at the college since it became a sanctuary campus in 2016, and the second, fourth, and sixth demands are at least partly in practice.
According to the college website, “to the fullest extent of the law,” it “will not voluntarily share student information with immigration enforcement officials,” “voluntarily grant access to college property,” or support their enforcement actions. This means that immigration agents can only lawfully enter college-owned private areas in the presence of a judicial warrant or subpoena, but they may still access public space on campus, which includes buildings like Parrish Hall, the Dining Center, and McCabe Library, without a warrant.
Regarding the demand that the college release an annual report on its interactions with ICE or DHS, Smithey said, “This sounds like a good idea, and I note that it reflects part of the Swarthmore Borough Council’s new resolution,” referring to §3.4 in the resolution that the Borough Manager will provide annual public reports on its interaction with federal immigration enforcements.
However, Smithey noted that the college is currently not meeting the fifth demand from the students. “The college maintains a contract with Enterprise [Rent-A-Car], the car rental company, but I have not heard about any moves to align the college’s contracts or investments with its Sanctuary commitments,” Smithey said. “We know that the Board of Managers, as a matter of policy, has committed to prioritizing financial returns over any other social concerns when making decisions about the college’s endowment.” This is also confirmed by a website called “Schools Drop ICE.”
In addition, some student organizers have expressed unease about the increasing number of surveillance cameras on campus. Although the college’s website clarifies that judicial warrants and subpoenas are required for law enforcement to request information from the college, its own use of camera footage to identify students who distributed allegedly violent zines may have raised questions among students.
When asked by The Phoenix for comment, Jesus Saucedo Bucio ’26, president of SIR and one of the organizers of “No ICE Week,” said that he has observed an increase in cameras across campus over the past two years.
While acknowledging that some cameras may be necessary for security reasons, he said “Sanctuary, in its core, means safety, and this cannot be accomplished if an institution, whether educational or federal, continues to ‘provide safety’ through the use of invasive surveillance. This is not safety, it’s control.”
Passage of the Resolution
The petition had gathered over 170 signatures by the time of the council meeting, which took place two days after the rally. It was led by SIR and Sanctuary Alliance for Everyone (SAFE), a student group founded months ago by students enrolled in a Smithey’s Organizing for Social Change class. According to SAFE members Nouriatu Leinyuy Mayenin ’29 and Shadia Dakam ’29, the plan developed into more concrete actions after they learned that the Borough’s Human Relations Committee (HRC) had already been alarmed by ICE tactics and held a meeting on Feb. 12 to discuss the possibility of adopting preventive legal measures to protect the borough’s immigrant community.
Following this, SAFE members reached out to the HRC and SIR, which had also been working to advance the resolution, and offered their support. They organized students to send emails to the Borough Council backing the proposal and raising several demands to the council, including a prohibition on any 287(g) agreement; a prohibition against information sharing and surveillance efforts with federal officials; a prohibition on the use of taxpayer funds for immigration enforcement and detention; and the implementation of a No Holds Policy, wherein individuals may not be detained over civil matters, SAFE member Azizakhon Kakhramonova ’29 told The Phoenix.
After learning from council members that the resolution was put on the agenda for discussion, SAFE members continued to push for its passage, shifting their focus to gathering petition signatures.
“We started [the petition] the morning of the rally. We got everybody at the rally to sign it, and then over the weekend, we digitized it, and then we got more people to sign it through an email link,” SAFE member Melisa Velasquez-Zunun ’29 said.
“We would say that [the emails and petition] were something significant to the passing of the resolution, because ultimately the student voice was able to shine through beyond the campus, but also on the council,” Velasquez-Zunun added.
Francie Halderman, one of the Swarthmore HRC co-chairs, said the potency of the resolution comes from three factors: “it was a community-driven process, included partnership with key stakeholders, and contains numerous elements that include strong protections of civil rights and also welcoming content,” she wrote in an email to The Phoenix.
Halderman said that the HRC first started exploring potential measures against unlawful ICE tactics in January 2025, “after the presidential swearing in,” based on the moves Trump promised during his campaign. In the following months, Halderman met with the Delaware County District Attorney, Borough Council President Jill Gaeiski, and Police Chief Ray Stufflet to gather information before hosting the Feb. 12 meeting for public discussion.
“Students from the college attended, some on behalf of groups they were representing and some on their own behalf. Representatives for other groups in the community, including CADES and some faith groups, participated as well,” Halderman wrote.
In her response, Halderman also highlighted the distinction between “sanctuary” and “welcoming” measures, noting that the resolution adopted by the borough goes beyond sanctuary policy to combine efforts to protect immigrant residents with efforts to support their day-to-day life.
“Upholding protections of civil rights is imperative but, by itself, is making sure there is an absence of a negative, such as [saying] the borough will not enter into a 287-type cooperation agreement…” Halderman wrote. The resolution’s “proactive, welcoming language” goes beyond that, and it helps people “know they feel safe and that they belong here.”
When asked about the significance of this resolution for undocu+ students, Dakam said that it makes places like the train station safer for students, as the station is not considered part of the campus, and thus hasn’t been under the protection of the college’s sanctuary policies in the past. In addition, she highlighted the resolution’s potential impact on Delaware County and the Greater Philadelphia area, noting that passing a welcoming policy at the county level is much more difficult than passing one in a borough, but that these local, borough-level changes can accumulate.
“At least some little towns themselves are becoming sanctuary, and slowly it will become all, and that in itself is resistance against ICE,” Dakam said.
Halderman noted that the resolution not only strengthens protections for undocu+ students, but also extends those protections to other vulnerable groups in the borough.
“Through our HRC outreach, we learned some who live, work, or come here to shop at one of our businesses, or go to the PAC Center or other events, have understandable fear about ICE overreach wherever they are. Some have made significant alterations in their life as a result,” she wrote in an email to The Phoenix.
In the process of advancing the resolution, both students and Halderman identified their main challenge as concerns that the policy could attract extra attention from federal immigration enforcement and make the borough a target. However, at the April 6 council meeting, Halderman cited data from nearby municipalities indicating that adoption of welcoming measures does not increase the risk of being targeted by ICE.
Saucedo Bucio also dispelled this conception in the interview: “…[some] people in the College administration and in Swarthmore Borough believe that doing something to affirm Sanctuary is going to put a spotlight on our campus and community. However, the spotlight is already there. Swarthmore is known not only to the federal administration for its Sanctuary policies and somewhat progressive values, but also to the general public as well.”
Saucedo Bucio thought that this sentiment against adopting further measures may come from a fear for the unknown and uncertainty when it comes to federal immigration policies. “When you have students telling you about the reality of their daily lives and the limits imposed on them and/or their families, it becomes real and scary, so they’d rather stay silent, but silence doesn’t protect us; action does,” he added.
Moving Forward
After the passage of the resolution, SAFE and SIR members expressed hopes to see the Borough turning it into an ordinance, which carries a legal binding force, in the future. According to the Legal Information Institute (LII), a resolution is a “formal statement of opinion or a decision to take an action,” while an ordinance is counted as a local law or decree.
Earlier this year, the borough council and students chose to propose a resolution because the process of its adoption requires shorter time and its adjustment is more flexible than an ordinance.
“The current resolution went into effect immediately after the council vote. Should ICE come up with some illegal or extrajudicial strategy from left field no one has anticipated, a change could conceivably be made quickly in response. Ordinances take longer — sometimes many months,” Halderman noted.
Due to the rapidly expanding scale and severity of immigration enforcement, pursuing a resolution allowed the sanctuary measures to be enacted as soon as possible. She said that in the event that the written commitments are not followed, they would be addressed by the borough regardless whether they belong to a resolution or an ordinance. Especially because of the unpredictability of ICE tactics, Halderman said that the HRC believes the resolution, with easier procedures when it comes to making changes and amendments, to be “a solid mechanism for the specific needs.”
Students expressed that the resolution should be the first step toward legally effective policy. “We are grateful for the passing of Resolution 25-2026, but we want to emphasize the need for these policies to be enforceable law,” Saucedo Bucio said.
When asked about the next steps of the college’s sanctuary efforts, Smithey shared his belief that it should continue to hone its policies and practices to better respond to the developments of immigration law enforcement, and that as a community, the college should work on raising their awareness of undocumented and undocu+ students’ needs and experiences.
“A lot has been going on across the college to put the spirit of sanctuary into practice, and we have more work to do.”
