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This story was originally published by Prism.

She was beginning her spring semester as a second-year law student and paralegal when she received the news: The immigration clinic where she volunteered would have to stop all work, a demand directly from the Trump administration.

The White House issued a stop-work order on Feb. 18, 2025, cutting off aid to federally funded unaccompanied children programs (UCPs) across the U.S. The programs, which provide legal representation to migrant youth who cross the border alone or do not have family in the U.S., were one of the current Trump administration’s first targets.

“I was told to just go home and literally stop working,” recalled the law student Marsha, who is using a pseudonym for fear of retribution.

Days later, on Feb. 23, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) distributed a memo with a new task for its agents: search for unaccompanied children nationwide and target them for deportation.

This included children such as those Marsha worked with. At the clinic, she assisted them with requesting and receiving court appointments, gaining work authorization, and preparing asylum cases. Some were as old as 18. Others were as young as 3.

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As a result of the funding cuts, according to Marsha, the clinic was forced to deny legal representation to children on a waitlist for more than a year and stop providing legal aid to those it was actively working with.

“It’s completely antithetical to this administration’s stance that everyone should be here legally when you’re gutting the legal infrastructure for that process,” Marsha said.

However, this appeared to be the Trump administration’s strategy: tear down previously established resources as a way to fuel mass deportations, which are then carried out by ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Agents ripped families apart, caused loved ones to disappear, and rounded up those it claimed were present in the country “illegally” — including U.S. citizens and Native Americans.

In her law school classes, Marsha studied what she was watching in real time: immigrants being treated as national security threats. Then in April 2025, she was enraged to learn that the college she attended, St. John’s University in Queens, New York, signed an agreement with CBP, one of the agencies responsible for immigration enforcement.

“These are the same people [the clinic was] taking to court to convince them that this child who crossed the border alone deserves to stay here, does not deserve to go back to a war-torn country — a country that was destabilized by American policy,” she said.

Prism filed a public records request on Oct. 2, 2025 to obtain a copy of the agreement between St. John’s and CBP. The agency did not provide the records by publication time, in violation of the Freedom of Information Act.

When the agreement was announced by St. John’s, university leaders said the goal of the collaboration was to create the “Institute for Border Security and Intelligence Studies,” which the university claimed would help CBP “identify intelligence challenges.” The agreement also planned to allow CBP to access the university’s Homeland Security Simulation Lab, where faculty, students, and agencies use virtual reality to simulate scenarios such as terrorist attacks and civil disorder.

Marsha couldn’t have known then that St. John’s would suspend its partnership 10 months later, following widespread pushback from faculty, students, and alumni, as well as reporting by several media outlets, including Prism.

But the troubling signs were clear: In the throes of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, immigration enforcement was becoming embedded within colleges, with little to no community oversight, legal transparency, or guardrails to protect students, faculty, or staff.

Nearly one year has passed since the first agreements between universities and immigration agencies were signed in April 2025. Today, 17 colleges have active agreements, according to a review by Prism. They include three Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) and one Historically Black College and University (HBCU).

Students and faculty across campuses have overwhelmingly voiced their opposition to the agreements and advocated for the agreements to be terminated, arguing that they create a dangerous environment for anyone who is or perceived to be an immigrant on university campuses nationwide. So far, St. John’s is the only school that has backed out.

Fresh out of graduate school in 2004, Dohra Ahmad was thrilled to be hired at St. John’s to teach English with a research concentration in anti-colonial movements. As the daughter of an immigrant, the university’s mission statement, one rooted in social justice, spoke to the professor.

“From the beginning, every part of St. John’s that I interacted with — from my interview, to the faculty orientation, to the mission office — told me that this was a historically immigrant-serving institution,” she said.

During the first Trump administration that began in 2016, Ahmad said St. John’s made efforts to be a safe space for students. The university also appointed its first immigrant, nonwhite, and non-priest president two years prior. During the first wave of anti-immigrant sentiment ushered in by Trump and his supporters, the school’s choice of president felt significant.

But more recently, she began to wonder if the university was sincere in its social justice mission. The CBP agreement was “a gut punch,” she said.

As the Trump administration waged war against immigrants in the first half of 2025, St. John’s at first defended the newly formed partnership with CBP. Administrators involved in the partnership insisted that CBP and ICE had different functions, according to a source who is familiar with the conversations among St. John’s leaders.

“When St. John’s first made the deal, they said, ‘Listen, this isn’t ICE, this is actually CBP. They’re doing the work of who gets in at the border and what goods get into the country. That’s different from ICE,’” said the source, who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to speak publicly. “But not anymore. They’re now an arm of ICE; they’re indistinguishable.”

In recent months alone, countless videos, photographs, and stories from around the country show CBP assisting ICE with enforcement operations. CBP has also helped........

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