How San Diego's community colleges are responding to ICE arrest of student

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Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman. On this episode of KPBS Midday Edition, a Haitian City College student remains in ICE custody after being denied bond. What we know about the student and how the City College District is responding after ICE showed up on campus. This is KPBS Midday Edition, connecting our communities through conversation. Two weeks ago, Renato Cassius was arrested by ICE agents on his way to San Diego City College, where he's a student. On Friday, Renato faced his first bond hearing at the Otay Mesa Detention Center, but was denied bail. The local campus community has rallied around him, but many students, faculty, and staff are left feeling anxious about immigration enforcement on their campuses. I'm joined now by Gregory Smith. He's Chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, which includes City College, Mesa, Miramar, and the San Diego College of Continuing Education. Chancellor Smith, welcome.

Thank you. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon to you. I'm glad you're here. It's been two weeks since Renato's arrest. How has the district been responding since this incident?

It's been a deeply unsettling time for our district. We did a lot of planning around the possibility of immigration enforcement affecting our students, our employees, and our campuses. And we've learned a lot from this moment. There have been considerable efforts to support Renato and his family. We've had a student, excuse me, one of our employees who speaks Haitian Creole that's been able to provide translating services for them. We've connected them to a number of resources in our community and that we offer. We've been able to fundraise to cover legal expenses for Renato's defense. We've been able to provide help with transportation, food, and other things that the family needs in this moment because Renato was doing much of that. We've had a lot of work internally to review the incident, what happened, what... we can do to better our response to these moments to hopefully prevent another incident like this happening and to provide a lot of time and space and resource for people to process the trauma that they experienced either directly as they witnessed ICE's engagement near our campus or have experienced as a member of the community where Someone that we value, that we care about, was forcibly taken, and that has significant impact on people. And so we've been trying to support everyone as much as we can with managing that, processing that, and being able to continue to meet the needs of all of our students as they continue their education.

Do you have any sense of how Renato is holding up in ICE custody?

We have been able to have both President Ricky Shabazz of City College, some of our employees have been able to go down and speak with Renato's attorney to actually see him directly. The reports that I've heard is he's doing as well as anyone could do given the circumstances of what has