UNLV president agrees to meet with students on undocumented issue

UNLV President Len Jessup plans to meet late next week with a group of students who sent a letter to his office last Friday listing four demands related to protecting undocumented students on campus.

“It’s a good thing,” said Jazz Sheffer, a representative for the UndocuNetwork at UNLV, who signed the letter along with nearly 50 other people, mostly students. “We are going to wait and see what the meeting ends up looking like, but we’re so grateful that he reached out to us after we requested the meeting. I’m looking forward to it.”

Students also said in the letter that they wanted to meet with Jessup prior to the end of the current semester on Dec. 17. Jessup was not available for comment this week.

The letter was sent two days after a part-time math instructor at UNLV said that he would alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement about students in his class who may have come into the country illegally. He later apologized for his remarks.

The termination of the instructor, George Buch, was second on the students’ list of requests. Earlier this week, UNLV Spokesman Tony Allen said the university “thoroughly reviews” all inquires filed with the compliance office, but does not comment publicly on personnel matters involving employees.

“We want the appropriate course of action to be taken by the university,” Sheffer said of Buch.

Also listed in the letter was the request to make UNLV a sanctuary campus, the creation of an undocumented student coordinator and mandatory cultural competency training for all UNLV teaching staff.

“In everything we do, we want to try to center the voices of the group who are impacted the most,” Sheffer said. “That’s a priority for us. The important thing is whether or not the university is truly going to prioritize this issue and the safety of its students. If they are able to show that, then moving forward, we should be able to find some solutions.”

Allen said Friday that the university is “strongly supportive of its Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and undocumented students and will continue to do everything in its power to provide them, and all of UNLV’s students, an environment of safety and success on campus.”

Contact Natalie Bruzda at nbruzda@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3897. Follow @NatalieBruzda on Twitter.