Since Trump was elected, Augustana and numerous other colleges around the country have agreed not to release immigration information to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is a reaction to the fear that the person about to take the Oval Office has plans to make drastic (negative) changes to our immigration policies.
Since the beginning of his campaign, Trump has been riding the anti-undocumented immigrant train towards victory. For years, the Republican media has been reporting that immigrants are taking jobs, committing crimes, and simply by their status as “illegal” makes them a threat to our national security. Perhaps one of the reasons that Trump got the attention he did was that he talked about treating undocumented immigrants the ways that the rest of the Republicans pretended they would.
With that attitude now controlling Washington D.C., it makes sense that institutions across the country are interested in protecting their immigrant populations from the likely repeal of Obama’s DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which protects those people who have been Americans for virtually their whole lives.
People protected by DACA are normal citizens who are productive members of society, who could go on with their business without having to worry about things like deportation. For many of them, that secure feeling is already gone.
On a side note, there’s little evidence that undocumented immigrants have been doing significant damage to the country. In multiple ways, they’ve actually had a role in upholding the country (like Social Security, providing at least $7 billion a year). 
That’s not what’s important, though. I would like to try and convince those who don’t see things my way that removing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals would not accomplish what you think it will, and is probably not what you think it is.
According to former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, DACA never prevented deportation for undocumented immigrants. Rather, it was a new method of “targeting” undocumented immigrants that were legitimate threats. In Napolitano’s own words in the New York Times, the directive “changed enforcement policies to focus on those immigrants who posed a national security or public safety threats.” Threats would be gang members or drug dealers, or people of that nature.
For Trump supporters who supported his deportation ideas, that should sound appealing. The DACA directive was exactly what Trump would need to accomplish his goals of removing the immigrants that are causing problems.
DACA was never some form of Obama overreaching and ignoring the laws of the United States. It was a form of focusing authority on criminals, not the people who ended up in the U.S. and are leading productive lives.
If you’re truly interested in getting the undocumented immigrants that are causing problems, then you would realize that the 700,000 people benefiting from DACA are not your target. If you truly believe that undocumented immigrants are ruining your country, you are better off catching the people that actually do damage, not wasting enforcement resources to ruin good peoples’ lives.
Augustana college has recognized this, and that is why Augustana and the other colleges from around the country are doing the right thing. In an odd way, Augustana’s decision not to share any information with Immigration Customs Enforcement has killed two birds with one stone.
They are protecting good people from being targeted unnecessarily, and not wasting Immigration Customs Enforcement’s resources to target the people who are genuine threats to the United States.