U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement canceled some of its interviews with students at the NYU School of Law’s Public Interest Legal Career Fair after a petition condemning the agency’s participation garnered more than 1,000 signatures in the last week. At least five employers withdrew from the event in protest of ICE and a union representing legal groups across New York City publicly criticized its involvement.
Last week, a group of students drafted a petition demanding that NYU Law revoke its invitation for employers from the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor — the legal branch of ICE — to attend the PILC fair, scheduled to take place Thursday and Friday. In the petition, students call the prospect “abhorrent” and contradictory to the purpose of the fair, which is an online networking opportunity for thousands of law students in the tri-state area focused on nonprofit and community-based work.
The petition cites ICE’s history of racial profiling, ignoring the law and agreement to “treat immigrants as a security threat.”
On Wednesday, PILC emailed students who had signed up for a drop-in style interview with OPLA, informing them that the agency would no longer participate in that part of the interviewing process. However, those who applied to speak with OPLA ahead of a mid-January deadline will still have their interview.
“They’re scared of speaking to students who did not apply,” one third-year at NYU Law said in an interview with WSN. “They’re only talking to people who they know want to talk to them.”
Yesterday morning, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys and Legal Services Staff Association — unions representing legal institutes across New York City — publicly called for their members to withdraw from the career fair as long as ICE was still slated to attend in any capacity. Both unions have histories of representing undocumented immigrants in court.
Since the statement, five institutions — including Appellate Advocates, Center for Family Representation and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem — have entirely rescinded their participation in the career fair. Because of the last-minute switch, some institutes rescheduled all scheduled interviews to take place outside of the PILC fair, while others directed students to their regular job applications.
Students who created the petition said they sent it to NYU Law Dean Troy McKenzie and requested to meet with administrators. They said the school responded and arranged one meeting with a small group of the students, but that it was “not representative of everyone who signed the petition” and that “nothing came out of it.”
In interviews with WSN, several students who requested to remain anonymous because they hope to keep an “open line of communication” with administrators, said the law school’s choice to invite ICE did not align with most public interest law, which often focuses on legal advocacy for marginalized communities. They said that while the category technically encompassed any government agency, the inclusion of ICE was contradictory to much of the work it does highlighting initiatives such as its Immigration Defense Initiative and other human rights-based clinics.
“That’s really where the space becomes tricky, where you say government entities — point blank — are public interest,” another third-year at NYU Law said. “There’s a huge range of what that looks like, and what kind of jobs you do as a government lawyer.”
In a statement to WSN, NYU Law spokesperson Michael Orey also said that the administration had “discussed students’ concerns” and emphasized that the career fair is entirely online, with no employers coming to the campus in-person.
“The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with a large number of other federal, state and local government agencies, has participated in the PILC Fair for many years,” Orey said. “Students from a number of law schools have registered for interviews with them.”
In 2022, the law school faced backlash for inviting two ICE attorneys to a career event. A petition from the school’s Immigrants Rights Project garnered more than 80 signatures and support from student groups including Law Students for Justice in Palestine, NYU’s chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild and the school’s Federal Defender Clinic.
NYU has been hosting the career fair for 48 years. It’s one of the latest public interest-oriented fairs in the country, and last year saw over 1,800 law students and 300 employers. Since 2021, it has been entirely virtual, and is now open to students from 20 schools including Columbia Law School, Yale Law School and Cornell Law School.
The PILC fair comes three days after an NYU spokesperson told WSN the university “will comply with the law” amid President Donald Trump’s prospective crackdown on immigration enforcement at college campuses. The university also issued a public statement clarifying that immigration enforcement officers would not be allowed on campus without legal grounds and advising concerned students to speak with NYU’s Immigrant Defense Initiative or their own attorney.
“The fact that ICE is allowed to participate in a campus career fair was never acceptable, but it is especially egregious now,” another third-year student told WSN. “At worst, it speaks to carelessness, and at best, it speaks to cowardness.”
Contact Dharma Niles at [email protected].
