Amid changes to federal immigration polices, frustrations surrounding Executive Order 51 have some faculty, staff and union leaders representing employees at the University of Missouri questioning the safety and legality of the mandates.
This comes following the university's recent update to its Collected Rules and Regulations Section 110.110 outlining requirements for full compliance with law enforcement investigations that may involve agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the U.S. Department of Education.
The language causing the most criticism falls in Section 1.a.6 which calls for employees not to interfere, even if no Office of General Counsel consultation has occurred with the student.
MU spokesperson Christopher Ave said the executive order is meant to clarify existing policy.
“CRR 110.110.C.1.a.6 simply directs employees not to attempt to interfere with law enforcement officials. It does not require employees to actively assist law enforcement officials in a situation in which the official refuses to wait for supervisor / OGC consultation to occur,” Ave said.
The provision in question
Members of LiUNA Local 955, a union that represents service and maintenance workers at MU, MU Health Care and University of Missouri Kansas City, released a statement co-signed by the American Association of University Professors at MU expressing concerns about the university's adoption of the executive order. The union also led a town hall on Saturday discussing the issue.
“Executive Order 51 comes at a time in which universities are increasingly becoming a site for ICE raids, including targeting U.S. legal permanent residents," Andrew Hutchinson, LiUNA Local 955 representative, said in a press release. "It requires university employees to cooperate with law enforcement officials requesting information, whether they have a warrant or subpoena, despite individuals' rights to refuse entry to ICE without a warrant."
This concern arises with heightened federal action on student deportations.
Amid a broader effort to reshape immigration policy, the Trump administration has moved to cancel more than 1500 international F-1 student visas in recent weeks — a push that has also included threats to freeze grant funding for universities that do not comply with federal directives.
In Missouri, international student visas have been revoked at Washington University, Saint Louis University, Webster University, MU and several other universities across the state.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration’s stance on student visa revocations in a recent press conference.
“The revocation of visas is a right the Secretary of State holds under the immigration and nationality act, and if a visa student, a foreign national who came here with the privilege to study at one of our universities is acting in an adversarial way to our foreign policy interests, the secretary of state reserves the right to revoke that privilege,” Leavitt said.
MU has about 3,100 active faculty members in various teaching, clinical, research and tenured or tenure track roles. Approximately 1,100 of these faculty members are tenured or tenure track, of which 90% have some form of sponsored research activity.
Charles Munter, an associate professor at the College of Education & Human Development and a member of the AAUP at MU executive committee, noted that recent developments at other universities may provide context for concerns surrounding the executive order at MU.
"Regarding the risk of losing grant funding, I think the AAUP sees events that have unfolded at Columbia, Tufts, Harvard and other universities as threats not just to those institutions but to higher education in general,” Munter said. “I am not aware of MU receiving any such pressure. I think MU has preemptively complied on a number of issues in recent months, so it’s possible this is another."
"Whatever the motivation for it might have been, though, I think there’s frustration that this executive order was created at all," he added.
Michael Duff, a Professor of Law at Saint Louis University specializing in labor law, raised concerns about the expectations that could be placed on union members under the executive order.
“If I act under this policy, what if after the fact, it's determined that what the federal official is doing was illegal, then I'm actually engaging in illegal conduct. I am facilitating illegal conduct," Duff said. "I need some assurance that I am not violating the law by facilitating a federal official that may be violating the law. That's a legitimate concern.”
Employee Bargaining Rights
In Missouri, public employees have a state constitutional right to collective bargaining, as established under Article I, Section 29 of the Missouri Constitution. This provision guarantees that employees have the right to organize, to form and join labor unions and to negotiate collectively regarding their terms and conditions of employment.
Although the right is not unlimited — and public sector bargaining can be subject to additional regulations — it affirms that employees must be given a good-faith opportunity to negotiate.
In this case, MU did not submit a request to bargain with LiUNA Local 955 before the revised policy went into effect.
“Generally when there's a revision to the collected rules and regulations, they're supposed to send before implementation, so they're supposed to send a request to bargain with us. They did not do so,” Hutchinson said.
MU's spokesperson challenged this statement explaining that no notice was provided due to there not being a conflict with Understanding of Policies.
“Regarding LiUNA, the Understanding of Policies Section 31 requires notice to the union when a CRR is issued that is in conflict with the UOP. Executive Order 51 does not conflict with the UOP, so no notice was required,” Ave said.
When the president issues an Executive Order, he sends it to the chancellors of each university under the University of Missouri System with a brief cover memorandum describing the rule and directing them to distribute the new policy.
New collected rules are reviewed by the intercampus Faculty Cabinet (IFC), which in turn requests input from campus faculty governance groups.
The memorandum and order are copied to the secretary of the Board of Curators, who has the order published online in the Collected Rules and Regulations. The Executive Order was issued March 4.
The swift implementation of the policy in March has raised questions about the order's purpose and implications.
“It's really hard not to see the timing of the policy as being a kind of political grandstanding,” Duff said. “We're not going to have our employees be perceived as questioning the legality of some of the things that have been going on. There are serious questions whether some of these actions are constitutional."
Duff explained that while he's not claiming that all of policies are unconstitutional, there is a question as to the constitutionality of a number of them that are currently under litigation in the DC Circuit Federal Court of Appeals.
"That's how serious of a question it is, so this is no idle speculation on the part of the union,” he said.
