(Photo by Carmichael Library)

Amid significant local opposition to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, two large area universities have partnerships with the agency responsible for deporting undocumented immigrants.

Both Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland at College Park maintain active contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making them part of a short list of higher education institutions that have contractual partnerships with the organization, including Northeastern University in Boston, the Vermont State Colleges system, and the University of Alabama Birmingham. Pressure has been mounting in recent months for many local institutions to dissolve their contracts, given the agency’s increased enforcement measures and particularly this summer’s child separation policy, which split small children from their parents at the border.

Some—like Fairfax County and the city of Alexandria—have cut their contracts off entirely or altered them to lessen the amount of time they keep migrants in detention for the agency.

At Johns Hopkins University, petitions and protests have demanded that the university sever its ties with ICE in the last year. Based in Baltimore, the school also maintains a significant D.C. campus for its business, arts and science, and international affairs schools.

While the University of Maryland at College Park also has a large active contract with ICE, it has not drawn similar kinds of attention.

UMD confirmed to DCist the existence of one active contract with the agency for a total of $625,000, which started in July of 2017 and is set to expire in January 2022. The contract covers up to 25 two-day anti-terrorism training sessions for ICE homeland security investigators sent overseas to U.S. embassies. So far $125,000 of the contract has been fulfilled.

The university does not appear to have plans to terminate the contract with the agency. University spokesperson Jessica Jennings told DCist that, because the contract doesn’t expire for another four years, “any discussions of renewing the contract are premature at this time.”

UMD also recently completed another contract with ICE for hazmat technician training, which began in July of 2017 and expired just last month. That contract was fulfilled for a total of $51,265.

UMD’s press office did not answer questions about whether it’s faced any internal opposition to its ICE contracts, but the school certainly hasn’t garnered the public opposition and media coverage as Johns Hopkins.

English professor Drew Daniel began circulating a petition in July to pressure Hopkins to terminate its contracts with ICE. “Given the extent and extremity of its cruel practices and the scale of ongoing human rights charters which ICE continues to violate, we do not see how in good conscience Johns Hopkins University can collaborate with this organization,” the petition reads. “Accordingly, we urge you to sever the ties that currently connect our two institutions together.” More than 2,000 people, most of whom appeared to be local to the Johns Hopkins community, signed on.

The institution currently has five active contracts with ICE totalling more than $1.6 million, set to expire at various points in 2019. According to Johns Hopkins, the contracts are for educational programs that provide leadership and emergency medical training to law enforcement personnel, including ICE. Since 2009, the university has held 37 contracts with ICE, with the most lucrative worth nearly $950,000. In total, the university has earned more than $6 million from the contracts since 2008.

On September 26, students and faculty held a protest and presented the petition to university leadership. Last week, the university president, Ronald J. Daniels, and provost, Sunil Kumar, announced in a letter that the institution will not end the contracts, citing the importance of academic freedom in their decision.

“Our reasoning is grounded in the university’s longstanding deference to faculty decisions made in relation to their research, teaching, and clinical work,” the letter reads. “This stance is an aspect of our more generalized commitment to the principle of academic freedom. … We believe that it would be antithetical to the mission of the university if we were to insist that faculty members withhold instruction or medical care in order to have the university express its disapproval with certain aspects of current federal policy.”

Daniel, for his part, sees it differently.

“Academic freedom is not unbounded as an ideal. In some circumstances, they would regard behavior [by a contracting agency] as not acceptable. But they are regarding this behavior as acceptable,” he says. Daniel also takes issue with the specific educational programs the university offers to ICE, particularly the leadership training.

“Leadership training is showing an organization how to carry out its mission in a more effective and efficient way. We don’t want to make leadership in doing something bad more efficient and more successful,” he says. “Hopkins is a private institution, and we’re under no obligation to assist ICE. I think history will judge ICE harshly, and it saddens me that Johns Hopkins will be a part of that legacy.”

Daniel says he doesn’t think the fight is over, and he expects the community will reassess and plan to continue pressuring the university until it has no more active contracts with the the agency.

Gabe Schneider contributed reporting.