St. John’s University, facing an uproar from faculty, students and alumni, has suspended a short-lived partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to train students for careers in homeland security.
The decision to pause the initiative, the Institute for Border Security and Intelligence Studies, was announced in a Jan. 29 email from Law School Dean Jelani Jefferson Exum to the university’s law school faculty and confirmed by Simon G. Moller, a St. John's administrator, in a statement to Gothamist.
“After constructive, mission-focused conversations with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the decision was made to suspend, in advance of the one-year renewal, the academic partnership by mutual agreement,” said Moller, who is the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Catholic university in Queens.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, did not immediately respond to questions about the suspension.
The move follows outcry from St. John’s students and faculty after the partnership was announced last June. The suspension also comes amid a nationwide backlash over federal immigration enforcement, including the fatal shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis last month.
The university found itself caught in a larger reckoning by Catholic Church leaders who have been increasingly critical of the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, including the outsize toll on non-white parishioners and other community members.
Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pontiff, has criticized the administration’s enforcement initiative and “inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States.”
The suspension of the St. John's program was applauded by members of “No CBP at SJU,” a collective of faculty who opposed the partnership.
“ We think it's the right thing,” said Raj Chetty, a professor of English and member of the collective who had signed a petition opposing the partnership.
He added that the partnership “very clearly flies in the face of the university's Catholic Mission, Vincentian mission and focus on justice and social justice.”
Jefferson Exum’s email was the first word of St. John’s about-face for most in the school community.
“I write to share that the University has suspended its partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” she wrote in the email, which was reviewed by Gothamist. “The University reached this decision in recent weeks after concluding that the partnership is currently incompatible with the mission of St. John’s.”
Jefferson Exum declined to comment.
In its announcement last year, St. John’s said the planned institute would nurture “the next generation of homeland security professionals." The university signed a memorandum of understanding with CBP officials, including Frank Russo, a St. John’s alum and the director of field operations at the agency’s New York field office.
“The knowledge you will bring from St. John’s will be invaluable to us,” he said, according to a release provided at the time. “Protecting our homeland is an incredible challenge, and we cannot do that without your contribution.”
The university has since removed the announcement from its website.
Meanwhile, outrage over enforcement activities by Department of Homeland Security officials has only grown.
St. John's Latin American Law Students Association has spoken out about the shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as well as the loss of “multiple” other lives during enforcement actions.
The group, in a statement cosigned by the school’s Immigration Law Society and the campus chapters of the National Lawyers Guild and American Constitution Society, said "this moment demands more than silence or neutrality."
The decision to suspend the program also comes amid increasing outcry by Catholic leaders, including the head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, Bishop Robert Brennan, over immigration enforcement.
“Today, too many of our brothers and sisters live under the shadow of fear,” he wrote in an essay coauthored with two other bishops in a Jesuit publication in December. “In particular, right now in our country, those who are Black, Brown, Asian and Native American live in fear of being profiled, detained or deported simply because of the color of their skin. This fear is not abstract. It is part of daily life for many in our parishes, our schools and our communities.”
