ASUC senators passed new resolutions and announced campus developments at the weekly Senate meeting Wednesday.
The first of these resolutions was SR 22/23-052 condemning the U.S. President Biden administration’s new proposed asylum rule.
The proposed federal rule would place new restrictions on migrants seeking asylum at the U.S. Southwestern border following the termination of the Center for Disease Control’s, or CDC’s, Title 42 Order on May 11, which allowed for the quick expulsion of migrants such as asylum seekers by the government under the premise of a public health risk during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The proposed rule, according to the resolution, will generally deny asylum to migrants who show up to the border without seeking protection in a country they passed through first. The rule would also deny those who do not apply for an asylum appointment through a smartphone app or country-specific humanitarian parole programs.
The rule will set a “dangerous precedent of curtailing civil rights for every community,” stated legislative coordinator in Senator Stephanie Wong’s office Noah Kuhn during the meeting.
“I’ve walked the desert that immigrants have to walk, I’ve seen destroyed shoes from children that have been there for months, I’ve seen rotting backpacks with rotting cans of food,” said ASUC Transfer Representative and immigrant Aileen Sanchez. “These are not numbers, these are people’s lives.”
The ASUC will be submitting a public comment condemning the rule to the Biden administration in hopes that he will not enact it, according to Senator Wong who sponsored the ASUC resolution.
Senators also voted to pass SR 22/23-046 in support of the campus offering the Transfer Admission Guarantee, or TAG, program, after its vote was pushed back for further consideration from last week’s senate meeting due to transfer students voicing their concerns with the program.
TAG program is currently offered at all UC campuses apart from UC Berkeley and UCLA. The program guarantees entry into UC schools to California Community College transfer students who meet credit and GPA requirements.
“It’s the right thing to do for transfers,” said Academic Affairs Vice President James Weichert. “There are issues to work through which is all the more reason to start discussing those now.”
Campus will eventually be required to implement the program by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Bill 928, which is why faculty would like to take charge of it now and implement in a way that works best for the campus, Weichert added.
Vice President Giancarlo Fernandez and Senator Mahathi Kandimalla announced reaching a formal agreement with Management Leadership for Tomorrow, or MLT, to partner with ASUC to increase professional development for its members. MLT is a career prep program that helps college students break into a variety of industries such as software engineering, consulting and corporate management.
The partnership will give students in ASUC free access to resources such as individual peer advisor support and assistance creating professional resumes.
Weichert also announced the creation of a new college, the College of Computing, Data Science and Society, or CDSS, in Spring 2024.
Letters and Sciences computer science, data science and statistics majors will transfer into CDSS. Campus applicants will be able to apply for direct admission into the college.
Campus has also begun working on a new classroom building to replace the classrooms in Evans Hall which was deemed seismically unsafe. It will sit on the parking lot of Dwinelle Hall across from the Valley Life Sciences Building and will include an auditorium and patio space, according to Weichert.
The building construction will be completed in March of 2026.
Senators also passed SR 22/23-053 condemning the unlawful detainment of Amritpal Singh and Indian paramilitary operations in Punjab, India, calling upon campus administration to acknowledge the ongoing developments in the region.
