Villanova’s decision to invite Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the Career Fair is deeply disappointing. The Villanova Food News GroupMe, created to reduce food waste, exploded when one member alerted others that CBP would be present at the Villanova-run Career Fair. Some expressed that such information was irrelevant to the group chat. Others shared their support for Immigration Enforcement, while others criticized it.
The range of responses in the GroupMe and around campus in the following days mirrored similar apathy and disdain some students have expressed towards other on-campus activism. Why do people keep bringing up politics in (seemingly) apolitical spaces? What do people think they’re going to get out of making so much fuss and getting in everyone else’s way? Not caring about politics is political. It is a privilege for Villanova students to be annoyed that group chats are not revealing where to get pizza on campus like usual, while federal agents are murdering people in broad daylight.
How many people would have known as quickly as they did about CBP being invited to campus if it weren’t for those messages? This is the point of activism: to force us to look at what we would rather not, in places we don’t expect.
Abraham Lincoln initially resisted abolition, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years and Martin Luther King Jr. responded directly to criticisms that he wasn’t acting in the right time or place in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” To those with power, the right time for change is always tomorrow, and the right place is always elsewhere.
I was disappointed to see no concrete promises in the reflection University President Rev. Peter M. Donohue, O.S.A., Ph.D., shared with the university soon after news broke about CBP being invited to campus, but only a carefully worded assurance that he “will continue to use my voice against injustice.” What a sharp contrast to a quote he included in the very same email by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, who spoke on campus at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote Lecture on Jan. 20: “When you experience injustice in your community, you need to raise your voice.”
There is injustice in our community. Under President Trump, federal agents have (as of three days ago) killed eight people in 2026 alone, dismissed the necessity of judicial warrants and have engaged in increasingly violent behavior, such as employing explosives to force open doors and shattering windshields.
We can not reduce the legacy of MLK to quotes and a day’s break from work and school. We must remember he was a radical in his time. We can not allow the voices of society’s conscience to rot under the ground for decades before we heed their call.
Villanova should have never invited CBP to campus. Doing so created an atmosphere of fear in our community and not only failed to criticize but also validated their actions. Villanova has yet to take a stand on this issue. CBP decided not to attend the Career Fair.
“Organizations participating in this event were contacted through standard outreach to employers that have previously taken part in Career Center programs,” a University statement said on the matter. “US CBP-Office of Trade was included in that general communication based on its participation in past career-related events. Following the announcement of their participation, the employer informed the Career Center that they do not plan to attend this event.”
Villanova University must openly and explicitly denounce tyrannical actions from the federal government. It must listen to student concerns. It must do its part to advance social justice as MLK Jr. did and as Catholic Social Teaching compels it to do. Our students, faculty and staff must remember progress is not guaranteed and that it may be unpopular. We must not allow ourselves to be like those in history who watched silently as acts of injustice became government policies and eventually dug graves.
