A Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) spokesperson confirmed to the Voice that the university will not remove Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as employers at a virtual job fair set to take place on Friday, Jan. 23.
This comes after students received over one thousand signatories on a petition asking GULC and the George Washington University Law School (GWULS) to remove ICE and DHS as employers at the schools’ joint Public Service Recruitment Program (PSRP), a virtual job fair that allows students seeking public service jobs to interview with and speak to potential employers.
The PSRP is set to feature the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), which the largest legal program in DHS and serves as their exclusive representative in immigration removal proceedings, and ICE’s Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center (HRVWCC), which prosecutes and removes “human rights violators and war criminals” from the U.S.
On Wednesday, Jan. 21, a group of students involved in the petition and several on-campus organizations met with GULC interim Dean Joshua Teitelbaum. Belle Allmendinger (LAW ’27), a student who was involved in the meeting in their capacity as president of OutLaw, GULC’s LGBTQ+ student group, said that the dean told students that he would not remove ICE from the event during the meeting.
“The answer has been, ‘I regret that I’m disappointing you. We can’t change the policy,’ —or he won’t change the policy,” Allmendinger said.
A GULC spokesperson told the Voice that of the 250 public service employers set to participate in the PSRP, 20 are “nonprofits that focus on immigration advocacy or representation,” and over 50 are federal government offices, which include ICE and DHS.
“Our student body is a diverse community with differing career aspirations. If students wish to interview or meet with these offices, we won’t deny them the opportunity to do so,” a GULC spokesperson wrote to the Voice. “The participation of any organization in PSRP is not an endorsement by Georgetown Law or George Washington Law of that organization.”
According to Allmendinger and other students at the meeting, Teitelbaum said that he would be more comfortable cancelling the entire event rather than disinvite ICE so that all students and employers are treated equally. The students also said that Teitelbaum also explained that the PSRP has never disinvited an employer before, and that he did not believe this was an appropriate time to deviate from that policy.
“We were pressing that this is different. ICE, as it is behaving now, is different. We are seeing ICE shoot people in the streets, targeting protestors, targeting Black and brown people, targeting our own members of the Georgetown community,” Allmendinger said. “It really read as a corporate response to people’s genuine fears for their safety.”
In the petition, students cited ICE’s March 2025 detention of Georgetown professor and postdoctoral scholar Badar Khan Suri, who is currently petitioning the Trump administration for a wrongful arrest and violation of his First Amendment rights.
According to student organizers, 10 organizations have pulled out as a result of ICE’s presence at the PSRP, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, American Oversight, Bread for the City, the Asian Pacific American Legal Resource Center, and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender’s post-conviction division.
Several of the organizations that have withdrawn from the PSRP made up the nonprofits attending the fair that focused on immigration. These organizations will still interview the students they had scheduled to meet during the PSRP, but have rescheduled the meetings to not coincide with the event.
The petition comes as ICE’s scope and level of violence have become the subject of even greater national controversy. Since President Donald Trump came into office last January, ICE arrests have doubled, and the number of people in U.S. detention is at an all time high. ICE is also now the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency. While Trump campaigned on deporting “dangerous criminals,” ICE data shows that only 25.7% of current detainees have criminal convictions.
As of Jan. 8, 68,990 migrants are currently in ICE detention. In 2025, 32 individuals died in ICE custody, and four people have already died in the first 10 days of 2026. One of those individuals’ deaths has been classified as a homicide.
“ICE is a fascist organization, tasked with carrying out ethnic cleansing, family separation, and extreme brutality and violence,” the petition says. “There is no inclusion or justice in supporting ICE, an organization which attacks our immigrant communities and threatens their lives and livelihoods.”
Students also told the Voice that Teitelbaum told them that he did not believe ICE’s participation in the PSRP would be a physical safety threat, because ICE would not be on campus, but did understand that some students said it makes them feel unsafe.
However, students said that having ICE recruit at Georgetown Law, even virtually, endangers marginalized students on campus. Annie Gillani (LAW ’28), one of the students who launched the petition, said that if her classmates do accept a job from ICE as a result of the PSRP, their presence on campus may become directly threatening to their peers.
“To come back after they spend a summer working for ICE, and come back even more empowered in their racist mentalities and their anti-immigrant mentalities, it puts our students at risk,” Gillani said. “I don’t think any one of us wants to go to school knowing there are people who worked for ICE walking around us.”
I. (LAW ’28) is a Hispanic GULC student who requested to only be referred to by her first initial out of fear of retaliation by ICE. She feels that inviting ICE to have any sort of presence on campus, let alone recruiting her classmates, would make her and other students unsafe.
“Inviting ICE onto our campuses, virtually or otherwise, sends a message to students of color, sends a message to students of immigrants, or immigrants themselves,” I. said. “Students are supposed to be able to feel safe on campus, and we’re supposed to be able to go to class and not worry about what our name sounds like, or what the color of our skin is, and feel like we’re going to be targeted by either our school administration or the presidential administration.”
Felix (LAW ’28), who asked to only use his first name due to fears of retaliation, says he knows people who have been tear-gassed by ICE, and someone who had their shoulder dislocated in an altercation with an ICE agent. He and other students say that including ICE in the PSRP ignores the fact that they do not believe ICE is currently acting in service of the American public.
“There is no way that you can talk about democracy and human rights in America without talking about ICE right now,” Felix said. “In the context of the PSRP, something that is designed to give students an option to pursue public service jobs, to include ICE in that is essentially a concession that, because they’re part of the government, ICE is doing public service work, and that is not the case today.”
Despite his frustrations with ICE’s presence at the PSRP, Felix has been encouraged by the amount of his peers speaking out against GULC’s decision.
“The way that the student body has rallied behind the petition has been incredibly inspiring,” Felix said. “And it means a lot to be part of a community that cares enough to set up a petition like this.”
Felix encouraged undergraduates at Georgetown to join law students in advocating against ICE’s presence at PSRP and on campus.
“Obviously this is something that is happening at the law school, but at the end of the day, we are one Georgetown,” he said. “This is your school too. The undergraduate student body is a lot bigger. Your voices all matter. ”
