In Comparison: Loyola and DePaul YDSA Leaders Detail Efforts Toward Sanctuary Campuses

Two leading schools in Chicago for student activism — Loyola and DePaul — are in the process petitioning for sanctuary campuses approved by administration through their respective chapters of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA).

As outlined in DePaul and Loyola’s sanctuary campus petitions and the Sanctuary School and Safe Zone Movement, a sanctuary campus is any university which makes efforts to protect its campus community including undocumented faculty and students from the “oppressive threats” of ICE actions. 

When Loyola’s chapter was in its infancy during the 2024-25 academic year, co-chair Seamus Purdy envisioned a “political home” for Loyola students to “take agency” over the school’s current conditions. YDSA’s board members, including Purdy, officially began organizing the chapter in January 2025.

Purdy, a second-year art history and sociology major, began the sanctuary rights campaign with his YDSA peers in February 2025, shortly after Trump’s inauguration. He said he and others anticipated a “very, very strong onslaught from ICE, especially in Chicago.”

The chapter attracts a lot of students who want to be involved in tangible and direct political action, according to Purdy. Members show up to meetings, which take place in Mundelein on Wednesday evenings, and more than once, they’ve said “I’m here because I want to make a positive change.”

“We wanted to give students a way to fight against that through where they spend time every day,” Purdy said. 

Members canvas Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus mostly through direct conversations with individual members of the student body. They talk to students and hang up flyers, for example, as they come in and out of De Nobili Hall and during class transition periods. The interactions often invite conversations with students who weren’t previously aware of the organization.

Every year, YDSA holds a national workshop convention, bringing together chapters from across the country. Last year’s workshop took place in Chicago, and Purdy said attendance at the convention involved the chapter in conversations with “diverse personalities and perspectives” from other chapters, which helped Loyola YDSA settle on sanctuary rights as a campaign.

From there, the chapter went to community partners to determine what sanctuary rights would look like at Loyola. In an effort to understand what different groups of students wanted to see, YDSA members canvassed and collected signatures for the sanctuary rights petition. 

In early November, YDSA hosted a town hall with a “robust” 40 people in attendance, according to Purdy in which they outlined their vision for sanctuary rights.

Though he wasn’t comfortable with sharing details of YDSA’s conversations with administration and other student organizations, Purdy said they focused on the needs of immigrant communities and students at Loyola.

Purdy listed the chapter’s demands of administration. Among the top priorities are a request for the university to not voluntarily work with ICE and never hand over data to ICE where legally permissible, though Purdy said there are federal laws which put institutions in a “hard place.”

YDSA wants the administration to maintain and encourage current DEI efforts, including funding and resources for such programs and affinity organizations. They want legal support provided for any university member, whether they’re a professor, student, dining hall worker or someone else who might be targeted or detained by ICE, and for the university to notify anyone if their names are targets for federal detainment, according to Purdy.

Purdy said he thinks the biggest demand which administration could implement is making use of Loyola’s crime alerts network — the system in which students receive notifications via email or text about campus security threats — to notify students when ICE is nearby or on campus. The Phoenix previously reported on the university’s policy of “communicating necessary information directly with the students who they think need it most.”

YDSA demands the administration allow Loyola to host regular Know Your Rights training and has talked with other student organizations and civic groups — of which Purdy didn’t share details due to those conversations not yet being made public — to make the sanctuary campaign an expansive and diverse one.

At the tail end of the spring 2025 semester, YDSA sent a “handful” of communications to administration and delivered the first iteration of their petition. They didn’t receive any response.

“You’re going to have that institutional hesitancy,” Purdy said. “So that’s been a recurring roadblock, just trying to get administration to sit down at the table with us and really try and listen to student concerns, to try and align their actions with this Jesuit tradition they’re always preaching.”

Purdy said he’s talked with DePaul student committee members in the past and describes Loyola YDSA’s relationship with DePaul’s as a “rubber band effect.” Loyola students will go to DePaul’s meetings to take notes on what they’re doing in relation to their sanctuary rights campaign and provide constructive direction they might’ve not seen.

In return, DePaul YDSA members will stop in on Loyola meetings and provide their own feedback.

Loyola didn’t respond for comment by the time of publication.

Qarim, a fourth-year sociology major at DePaul, first heard about YDSA in his second year, the 2023-24 academic year, through labor unionization training offered to students and other age cohorts. In early 2024, with another student who had similar interest in YDSA, the two founded DePaul’s YDSA chapter — the first at any university in Chicago.

It started with a small organizing committee, and they officially registered as a student organization in February 2024. From then until right around the month after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, DePaul YDSA worked to help out faculty unions and student housing campaigns before shifting to the sanctuary campus campaign, according to Qarim.

In April, DePaul YDSA, months before Loyola, held a town hall to learn what the student body wanted out of the sanctuary campaign. Those words carried over into drafting demands for the sanctuary petition.

One demand was barring public safety and private security officers from working with the Department of Homeland Security.

In the beginning, Qarim said DePaul student orgs’ demands were “all over the place” by June 2024. By the next academic year, Qarim said they wanted to be more realistic with their demands.

“We realized, based on the scale of what was happening — especially in Chicago with immigration enforcement and Operation Midway Blitz — we had to decide to narrow down our demands to very specific ones,” Qarim said.

YDSA DePaul stipulated prohibition of any cooperation with ICE by the university, updated contracts with private security contractors, formal Know Your Rights training, rapid response, protection of international students by maintaining their enrollment status and the administration of legal aid.

The most important demand, according to Qarim, was informing students if ICE was on campus or nearby.

“We ended up narrowing our demands because we wanted them to be winnable,” he said.

YDSA DePaul ended up collecting over 3,000 signatures.

“It was the grassroots action we wanted, especially from a university that, every time any sort of action happens, they send a very broad message that will echo ‘We’re a family. Everyone’s part of the demon family. Love thy neighbor, strength and compassion in numbers and intentionalism,’” Qarim said. “They were pretty much just empty words because the policies in place didn’t necessarily reflect that love and compassion for one another.”

Qarim said YDSA decided to inform the university on their sentiments through one of the school’s community care panels, hosted Oct. 3. Student organizations including YDSA criticized the administration for its “reactive” approaches. 

An Oct. 6 guest letter published in the DePaulia, the university’s student run newspaper, detailed criticisms against the university for exhibiting “anticipatory obedience.” Qarim said it was clear to him there were no clear cut safeguards in place protecting students — DePaul was just waiting to follow the law.

DePaul didn’t respond to The Phoenix’s request for a comment by the time of publication.

Qarim said he heard from a third party that one of DePaul’s current students is being detained in an Indiana facility, and the university never publicly shared the information. The Phoenix was unable to confirm the legitimacy of this detainment.

At the community care panel, DePaul administration told the audience if ICE were to come on campus, the university would pressure them to come with a warrant.

YDSA DePaul went back and criticized administration on the point and asked for keyed access policies to university spaces. The policy was outlined in the YDSA petition.

On Oct. 24, ICE entered DePaul’s campus, the vicinity of campus and were near the theater school. YDSA, in communication with other rapid response groups, with Know Your Rights training under their belt, attempted to push ICE off to other areas.

“It was successful for us because they ended up leaving campus,” Qarim said. “But that was what we did. As far as combatting ICE, the university didn’t really do anything that day. All they did was send an email three hours after ICE had left.”

Qarim said he and the rest of YDSA DePaul have been in frequent contact with Loyola’s chapter, and he said each chapter is asking similar things of their respective universities.

“Even though we call this a sanctuary campus ‘campaign,’ it’s not really a campaign in the organizational sense,” Qarim said. “We’re not against the university. We want them to hold themselves accountable.”

Since delivering the petition a month ago, DePaul university hasn’t responded to YDSA DePaul, according to Qarim.

Editor’s Note: Seamus Purdy is a contributor to The Phoenix.