by Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix
April 19, 2025

Florida International University’s police chief believes the university community would be best served by the department signing an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, although the faculty is uneasy. 

During a Faculty Senate special meeting Friday, interim President Jeanette Nuñez, the former lieutenant governor, and FIU Police Department Chief Alexander Casas fielded questions from faculty members about what a 287(g) agreement with ICE will mean for students and faculty, particularly ones fearing detainment.

Under the agreement, FIUPD officers could act as immigration enforcement officials to question and detain people they suspect are in the country without authorization.

“If we have to deliver someone, we’re the ones you want to do it, because it will be done in the most FIU way, the most Panther way, we can think of,” Casas said. 

Casas signed the agreement with ICE, as have several other university police departments in the state, and is awaiting a response from the federal agency before officers can begin training. When it’s signed, Casas said, he will choose his “best officers” to be trained. 

“If I don’t sign that agreement, we open the door for other agencies who are on this agreement, whether they’re federal agencies in power to do so or state agencies directed by our governor or local agencies that have agreed,” Casas said. 

Casas told faculty he wants his department to have a say in how immigration enforcement goes at the South Florida institution.

“Once I deliver someone to Krome or turn them over to ICE, you’re right, I lose control. But, absent this agreement, I don’t even have input. At the very least, once they execute it, at least now I have input and my officers do have a little say in what could be the outcome,” Casas said.

“If it has to happen because there’s a warrant in the system, who do you want interacting with you? God, I hope you say it’s me,” Casas said. 

Nuñez said she spoke at length with Faculty Senate Chair Noël Barengo earlier in the week after he reached out. She added that she wants to make sure she is “constantly addressing concerns.”

Faculty Senate members were not so convinced. Florida universities have made national news for signing the agreement with ICE.

Students live in fear for their ability to remain in the United States, faculty members said. One professor shared about a student who is not a citizen who came to him worried after receiving a parking ticket. 

Juan Gómez, director of the Carlos Costa Immigration Human Rights Clinic at FIU, said students have approached him to say they are afraid to look up items on their computer. Some, in abusive relationships, are afraid to call police. 

“I don’t know the status of any of our students. PD does not have access to any of that information,” Casas said, adding that his department has to follow FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. 

Casas said he did not get a call from the governor encouraging him to seek a 287(g) agreement; instead, he approached Nuñez after conversations with other law enforcement convinced him it “really is with our best interest at heart.”

Faculty senators approved a resolution opposing the agreement, saying it “goes against the university’s values of truth in the pursuit, generation, dissemination, and application of knowledge, freedom of thought and expression, and respect for diversity and dignity of the individual.” The resolution called for the university to withdraw. 

Well into the two-hour meeting, Philip Carter, an FIU professor, remained unconvinced.

“It’s been good to hear you,” Carter said. “I haven’t heard anything that convinces me that this is a good agreement. It still sounds like a really bad agreement. I still worry about the safety of our students on campus who fear for their status and their safety. I worry, frankly, about all of us, I worry about faculty, I worry that there’s a slippery slope beneath us.”

Nuñez stressed that visa revocations and ICE agreements are different but sometimes get conflated. FIU has no control over visa revocations, she said. 

Earlier this week, FIU confirmed to the Phoenix that 18 students have had their visas revoked since Jan. 1. The University of Florida told the Phoenix that eight visas have been revoked; Florida State University, three.

Alana Greer, director of Community Justice Project, said the FIU 287(g) is “deeply unprecedented” and the “agenda behind relaunching these 287(g)’s is specifically engineered to break trust, to tear apart our communities and to get us to see our neighbors, our peers, our students as ‘other.’”

Greer referenced her involvement with a story the Phoenix reported on Thursday, when 20-year-old Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S. citizen, was arrested by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper as an “unauthorized alien” and held for ICE.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

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