A group of about 20 University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University students gathered in Schenley Plaza last Friday to protest U.S. Customs and Border Protection\u2019s (CBP) Virtual Career Expo events posted to Pitt\u2019s Career Central event calendar.<\/p>\n
The protest followed a student walkout demonstration at Pitt earlier in the day, and another protest at Carnegie Mellon opposed to the university\u2019s decision to host Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and AI conglomerate giant.<\/p>\n
Pitt has since removed the posts advertising the events and clarified they were posted by CBP to Handshake, a third-party career network and job search platform not directly affiliated with the university.<\/p>\n
Despite the protests, Carnegie Mellon doubled down on their choice, hosting Palantir Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cPalantir is trying to recruit students,\u201d Ilyas Khan, a Carnegie Mellon student said. \u201cPalantir is a company that uses AI surveillance in order to thought-crime migrants and people of color in order to put them in detention camps.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan said the protest aims to call on both university presidents, Farnam Jahanian of CMU and Joan Gabel of Pitt, to end ICE threats to their campuses and take proactive steps to protect immigrant students.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve sort of skirted around it,\u201d Khan said. \u201cWe want real, concrete action from the university administrations to prevent ICE raids and potential CBP actions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan said he predicts ICE activity will increase in the city in coming weeks, citing recent ICE arrests as close to Oakland as Wilkinsburg.<\/p>\n
Pitt student protester Mo Rivera said the modest turnout can be attributed to the protest being announced with short notice, but said it\u2019s still emblematic of a growing country-wide consensus on ICE.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole nation seems to be taking to decentralized organization, which I think speaks to the power of the sentiment and the power behind the movement,\u201d Rivera said. \u201cWe don\u2019t need a leader if everyone feels the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
In May of last year, the New York Times reported President Donald Trump partnered with Palantir, giving the company $113 million in federal government spending to track data of people in the U.S., including their bank account numbers, figures on student debt as well as medical claims and disability status.<\/p>\n
According to the American Immigration Council website, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has partnered with Palantir \u201cto use artificial intelligence and data mining to identify, track, and deport suspected noncitizens.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan said he worries Pitt and Carnegie Mellon will be targeted by ICE for their high international student populations.<\/p>\n
As of the 2023-24 academic year, Pitt reported 3,200 international students, and Carnegie Mellon reported nearly 10,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have so many folks of color here at these universities that [ICE activity near campus] is a huge risk for them,\u201d Khan said. \u201cIt\u2019s terrifying but that\u2019s the reality for a lot of us and we don\u2019t want to have to live that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Khan said that despite being a natural-born citizen, he still carries his passport with him everywhere he goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A group of about 20 University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University students gathered in Schenley Plaza last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-193067","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}