By Brittany Britto STAFF WRITER
Social media photos of three Rice University students dressed up as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for a Halloween event on campus sparked outrage.
Photos, tweeted by Rice senior Daniel Pham on Thursday, showed the students sporting shirts with the acronym “ICE” in bold white letters while waiting in line for a campus party that night. The tweet of their photos has since received more than 400 retweets, 1,500 likes and several comments as of 9 p.m. Friday and has caught the attention of university officials.
Rice President David Leebron tweeted that the students’ costumes “were remarkably insensitive given the present environment,” in which many Rice students, including those covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, “are unsure about their safety in this country” or concerned about their relatives or friends who face deportation or separation from their families.
“Let us turn this distressing incident into positive action and express our concern and support … for our many students who are threatened by current immigration policy, especially our students of Latinx heritage,” Leebron tweeted. “It falls on all of us to be thoughtful in our actions and create a welcoming environment for all.”
Rice’s student newspaper, the Thresher, which identified the three students who wore the ICE costumes in an article Friday, reported that the students have apologized in a written statement to the newspaper. Two of the students who held leadership positions on campus have also resigned due to failure “to promote inclusivity for which our roles serve to facilitate,” according to the Thresher.
“We disregarded how fellow students would react and did not consider the safety and wellbeing of others,” they wrote to the Thresher. The students also acknowledged in their statement that their costumes led to a Twitter thread “where hate-speech was incited” and “opened the gates for further negative discourse,” though they stated that they did not participate in the online discussion.
The Thresher reported that the students will also participate in a town hall meeting Tuesday for their specific college, McMurtry, which will be facilitated by the college’s diversity council.
The Halloween incident follows the university’s efforts to educate its community, tackle issues such as race and exclusivity and address its own history. Earlier this year, the university announced the launch of a “Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice” (university officials announced the task force members, which include Rice student, faculty and alumni, in a university-wide email on Friday). And in October, the university launched its Center for African and African American Studies — a first for the college.
Pham said the responses to his tweets showing the students in the insensitive costumes have largely been positive. The senior, who works at The Hoot, an on-campus student-run café, said he went to go visit some of his colleagues at nearby Willy’s Pub while taking a break from writing his paper. That’s when he saw the students, but at the time many people didn’t seem to notice the students’ costumes, he said.
“There wasn’t any loud happening in the line in regards to what they were wearing,” he said.
At least two students told the Thresher that they confronted the students that night.
“I continued to tell them why it was inappropriate for them to wear those costumes until they finally decided to take the letters off,” sophomore Mezthly Pena told the Thresher. “They got verbally aggressive with me so I left.”
Pena told the Thresher that she felt hurt by the students’ decisions to make light of such a serious issue.
“ICE is wreaking havoc on many families and causing a lot of death, and I just couldn’t understand why they would find it humorous,” Pena said. “I was also very disappointed that no one had said anything to them beforehand and that they had made it all the way into Pub with the costumes on.”
Pham decided to tweet out the photo to make people more aware of the situation, he said.
He said that even with the campus’s touted “culture of care” and the broader understanding that Rice is a “fairly liberal school … stuff like that still happens and those kind of opinions are still prevalent on campus.”
“There’s still work to be done,” Pham said. brittany.britto@chron.com