Nicholas Capalia
Co-News Editor
From Jan. 10–14, UC Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Associated Students (AS) will host a “Protect Your Peers Week” in collaboration with off- and on-campus organizations supporting undocumented and international students.
805UndocuFund, Unión del Barrio, Undocumented Students Services (USS), the Office of International Students & Scholars (OISS), and more will speak and conduct educational workshops.
AS representatives were inspired to create the week-long event as the federal government increases Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence both nationwide and in Santa Barbara County. Fall quarter saw talks of ICE agents trying to arrest a student at a UCSB Residence Hall.
In response to the incident — and general anxiety around ICE — on Nov. 17, 2025, AS hosted a single evening “Protect Your Peers” teach-in at Campbell Hall in collaboration with 805UndocuFund. AS plans to expand the scope of this one event across four days.
These upcoming workshops and teach-ins are meant for “getting ahead of the game as opposed to responding when bad things happen,” AS President Le Anh Metzger said in an interview with The Bottom Line.
Regarding a timeline of the events:
On Monday, Jan. 12, 805UndocuFund is hosting a Rapid Response Training.
On Tuesday, USS and the OISS collaborate to host the Know Your Rights and Legal Resources Event.
The events of those two days will be summarized in a town hall, similar in scale to last quarter’s Save Deltopia Town Hall. Members from various activist organizations and the Isla Vista (I.V.) community will educate and offer public comment on the issue of federal threats to I.V.
AS will end “Protect your Peers Week” on Thursday, Jan. 16, with a teach-in by Professor John Park from UCSB’s Department of Asian American Studies. He specializes in immigration policy and law, providing context for current American immigration policy.
The schedule is subject to change. Free food and drink will be provided at each event, with hot chocolate provided one night, and Zocalo catering another.
The central aim of “Peer Your Peers Week” is to educate the student body. With the tools learned from the week of workshops, AS hopes for students to take action, just like how the students of the AS Office of the President themselves planned the events.
“The UCSB admin in a lot of ways feels like their hands are tied. They can’t do a lot themselves. But they’ve been really supportive of us,” President Metzger said.
By doing what the university administration is currently unable to, AS hopes to achieve a sense of safety for the student body.
“UCSB is known as a sanctuary campus, and I want that to be a reality, not just a name or a tagline,” AS Student Advocate General Sydney Bivins stated.
But a challenge in planning the “Protect Your Peers Week” is tight timing. Talks of planning such a week only began late in the fall quarter, leaving AS the month of winter break to organize the event.
Yet, Metzger and Bivins have high hopes for student engagement. With similar time constraints, the first “Protect Your Peers,” planned in a week, gathered 112 students to Campbell Hall.
Bivins explained the broad name for the event, with ICE raids being “a campuswide anxiety, and it’s also something that even if somebody isn’t worried about being profiled, they’re worried for their friends, their co-workers, their fellow classmates.”
Bivins continued, “So we really wanted this to be an initiative of unity across campus, which is why we called it ‘Protect Your Peers.’”