GEO calls on University of Michigan administrators to protect our coworkers
JUNE 10, 2025
Graduate workers at the University of Michigan are closely watching developments related to international student visa statuses. Just two weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the federal administration’s intentions to “aggressively revoke visas” from Chinese students. How will our employer work to proactively protect the livelihoods of over 4,200 international graduate students and workers?
Graduate Employees’ Organization – AFT Local 3550 at the University of Michigan, a labor union representing over 2,000 Graduate Student Instructors and Staff Assistants at the University of Michigan, condemns the Trump administration’s attempts at restricting student visas, deployment of Homeland Security law enforcement to threaten and detain dissident students, and relentless political and financial attacks on academic freedom.
GEO remains steadfast in our commitment to protect our fellow graduate workers. While the University has failed to offer substantive guidance or resources, graduate workers in GEO continue to operate an emergency immigration hotline. Operational since April 2025, the hotline immediately connects U-M graduate workers to fully-funded legal advice—an urgent and necessary resource that U-M administrators have not provided or recognized the value of. The Safety Planning Toolkit (bit.ly/geosafetyplan), independently developed by graduate workers in GEO in consultation with lawyers, has become a model for other graduate workers, staff, and faculty at universities across the United States. GEO’s message remains clear: we protect each other, and we will fight to protect our and our coworkers’ livelihoods.
The events of Winter 2025 will go down as one of the most disastrous semesters for U-M administrators in the University’s history — pre-emptive compliance with Trump’s unjustifiable deportations of international students, pre-emptive dismantling of former President Ono’s own DEI 2.0 plan, nearly $1 million spent on private plainclothes investigators stalking and harassing student organizers and activists, and collaboration with the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office to suppress pro-Palestine activists.
The Ono-era policy of telling international students with illegitimately revoked visas to leave their jobs and lives in Ann Arbor and return to their countries of origin—effectively a pre-emptive compliance with blatantly unlawful executive orders—laid bare the University’s priorities: risk management above students and workers. The University of Michigan’s General Council has so far not had graduate workers’ best interests in mind. Instead, the University has chosen time and again to cower to the federal government. GEO urges the University of Michigan to take steps to proactively protect students and workers from clearly political maneuvers. Graduate workers are hopeful that the new Grasso administration at U-M will work with international students and workers to find more options than just leaving the country.
Graduate workers at U-M and across the country are anxiously anticipating further political headwinds which may upend their lives. GEO looks forward to working with the newly inaugurated President Grasso to courageously resist these political disruptions and protect the livelihoods of all workers and students at the University of Michigan.
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