“ICE killed a woman today.”

That was what my roommate said to me as we sat in the living room, scrolling on social media in our cold rental after a long day of school. The murder of 37 year-old mother Renee Nicole Good shocked us. These kinds of occurrences have become commonplace in the news and in our consciousness. Protesters imprisoned, legal observers shot and killed, families torn apart by masked individuals. We watch in horror daily as extreme violence is deployed across the country by ICE. We read the headlines, a piece of us mourns, and yet we continue to live.

There’s only so much terror you can internalize on a day-to-day basis before you start to lose hope.

For months now, Ball State University students have been engaged in a campaign to protect immigrants in our community from the terror organization known as ICE. I have played a critical leadership role in this campaign, alongside my responsibilities as a full-time student. Though the campaign has demanded absolute focus, our plea has been simple: we demand safety. We have demanded that the University take adequate steps to ensure the safety of all students, faculty, and staff on campus from unjust violence and arrest. We have asked that BSU make a statement affirming the legal rights of immigrants on campus, that they do not cooperate with any illegal DHS action to arrest community members without a signed judicial warrant, and that they provide non-compliance training to public-facing staff–the bare minimum regarding today’s cruel paradigm. In response to our plea, we have garnered what is now characteristic of the Ball State University administration: total silence.

Today, the threat of ICE is no longer composed only of illegal arrest, battery, and imprisonment. ICE now wields the capability to kill anyone who resists–and any bystander who happens to be in the way.

And so Ball State University, by way of its silence on the matter, no longer gives ICE permission just to kidnap its students–it gives them a carte blanche to murder them as well.

Throughout our campaign and others, the excuses made by the University administration as to why our demands regarding immigration, Palestine, and free speech are unrealistic have been echoed enough that they now form on our own lips far before being vocalized by administrators themselves. The script has been read and reread to us plenty of times. Not once has this University attempted to hold a genuine conversation with its student body. When the usual excuses have been exhausted, student conduct policies were recited to us. After that, we are clobbered by administrative punishment. Ball State University students, in the process of fighting for justice on campus, have lost their jobs, their housing, and even their status as students.

In this apathetic back-and-forth Ball State University has set a precedent: you have no right to speak with us. We have no interest in speaking with you. If you continue to cry at our feet, we will break your will to continue. If your will cannot be broken, we will remove you. The word “beneficence” thus is unmasked as a convenient catch phrase, rather than a policy the University abides by.

And perhaps we owe something to the University, its President, its Board of Trustees. What can they do? “Sanctuary” cities/campuses are illegal in the State of Indiana. Our Board is appointed by the Governor. Indiana’s Attorney General, Todd Rokita, referred to the slaying of Renee Nicole Good as “a violent attack from far-left radicals.” In response to the killing, Senator Jim Banks wrote “ICE isn’t going anywhere.” Nearly everything about the State apparatus is designed to prevent Ball State University from protecting its community from a blood-stained force our very State government hails as heroic. Cruelty has been celebrated and cemented as the new norm. Perhaps everyone’s hands are tied, no one is to blame, and thus nothing can be done.

But behind all the administrative difficulties, the realities of red state politics, and the endless games of “whose responsibility is it anyway,” is a deep cowardice–a cowardice that poses a deadly threat to BSU students, faculty, and staff. This University’s commitment to absolute silence in the face of heightened violence on Americans by ICE demonstrates BSU’s disinterest in our community’s safety. If ever ICE comes knocking on our doors–as they already have in the City of Muncie–BSU will likely remain a silent bystander, unwilling to shield legal observers from the same tragic fate that took Renee Nicole Good just days ago.

Who will it be that ICE takes from us tomorrow? Will it be one of our foreign-born faculty? A student at the wrong place at the wrong time? Will President Trump label the victim a “domestic terrorist” and will our University administration join that chorus? It is a sickening possibility to consider, but it is one that all American Citizens are now forced to–among them the students, faculty, and staff of this University.

Please, for the sake of our lives: do something.