Jason Koebler, ICE Is Using a University Building as a Deportation Office and the University Says It Can’t Do Anything About It, 404 Media (Oct. 28, 2025):
A university in Milwaukee is stuck with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as its tenant after the agency refused to leave a building the university intended to renovate into an architectural and civil engineering classroom building. Instead, the building is being used as an office for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the main part of ICE performing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. …
In 2023, an alum of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) sold a building at 310 E. Knapp St. to the school for a massive discount, with the intention of the building being renovated and turned into an academic facility. At the time, ICE was a tenant of the building but was in the process of building a new office elsewhere in Milwaukee. Its lease was set to expire in April, but ICE, through the General Services Administration (GSA) which handles real estate for the federal government, unilaterally extended the lease through April of next year and has the option to remain in the building through 2028, the university says. The university says there is nothing it can legally do to evict ICE.
This is bad. It is bad because so much of what ICE is doing is cruel and immoral, and its continued occupation of the space enables it to do more cruel and immoral things. It is also bad for MSOE, which can’t renovate the building into classroom sapce as it wanted to.
I don’t think it’s the case, however, that it is bad because it makes the university complicit in ICE’s cruelty:
Concerned students say the situation is untenable and immoral—the university is now collecting rent directly from the government, and ICE is processing undocumented immigrants from the office.
“Can you see how it might look like MSOE is helping facilitate their mass deportation effort?” a student asked university administrators at a meeting about the building last week, according to audio obtained by 404 Media. “It feels like the federal government’s goals and objectives of mass deportation right now outweigh the academic use of that building for MSOE,” another said.
Moral complicity is usually described in terms of the actions you take, or sometimes fail to take, that contribute to another’s wrongdoing. If the university voluntarily agreed to lease the space to ICE today, that might make it complicit in ICE’s kidnappings and deportations. But buying the building was not complicity, because ICE had a lease to stay through April, and it could stay there regardless of who owned it. Buying the building or not buying it made no difference to any of ICE’s activities. The same goes for the lease extension. This is something forced on MSOE, not something the university chose to do.
Instead, I think the first student is articulating something closer to a theory of complicity as contagion. On this view, ICE is an evil presence that pollutes everything it touches. If you fail to remove the pollution, you also become unclean, and capable of polluting others. ICE’s presence in a university-owned building, and payment of rent to the university, makes MSOE unclean, so that students also have to be concerned about their potential pollution from being enrolled there.
To be clear, I think this view is wrong. But I also think it is highly prevalent today. You can see something like it in the radiating circles of attempted boycotts around Israel: the government, companies that do business there, companies that provide services to companies that do business there, institutions whose executives work for companies that provide services to companies that do business there, and so on. You can also see something similar in religious-exemption arguments: objectors frequently have to strain to explain why baking a cake is a matter of deep conscience, or why filing a form objecting to contraceptive coverage constitutes an endorsement of contraception. These examples, and many others, become much easier to understand if you think of the thing they object to as a polluting force, rather than a source of moral reasons for actions.
We had a family discussion last night and decided to cancel our subscription to Disney+ and Hulu. It was an easy choice, because it was such a clear-cut case. Jimmy Kimmel’s supposedly awful comments were civil and mild; there is no plausible theory of the First Amendment on which they are not core protected speech. The governmental coercion was blatant and thuggish; Brendan Carr’s threats against ABC were themselves a First Amendment violation. And Disney’s capitulation was so staightforwardly cowardly and greedy that there is nothing much more to be said.
The people running America’s institutions, from Bob Iger and Brad Karp and Claire Shipman on down, act and talk like they don’t have a choice. The government has such power, and we have so much to lose, they say. If we fought, we might win a few rounds, but the revenge would be fearsome. Some of our customers, or clients, or donors agree with the demands, and who are we to tell them no? Thousands of people work here, and many more depend on us. And is the ask really so onerous? What’s one talk-show host compared to an $8 billion merger? Our hands were tied.
But they had a choice. They always had a choice. They had a choice, and they chose tyranny.
And we have a choice too. We always have a choice. We have a choice, and we chose to walk away from Disney.
For some reason, this passage reminded me of how Internet companies think about user consent:
“There are certain things black shamans can do—and certain things people trained by them can do. You’ve seen a sample already. There are worse things: transport into the false worlds, into the dream borders, binding forever in places which exist within the mind and have virtually no exits to the outside world. But to do any of these things, the shaman believes that his ritual demands consent. Listen to me, Marianne.”
“I’m listening. You said the ritual demands consent.”
“Remember it. The shamans believe the ritual is necessary to the effect, and they believe that consent is necessary to the ritual. The shaman says to his victim, ‘Will you have some tea?’ And the victim says, ‘Yes, thank you.’ That is consent. In my own library, your brother said to you, ‘Come, let me introduce you to …’ and you nodded yes. That was consent. So she then struck at you.”
“Did the people who went riding consent? If so, to what?”
“More likely, Madame went down to the stables before going to bed last night, taking a few lumps of sugar with her. ‘Here, old boy, have a lump of sugar,’ and the horse nods his head, taking the sugar. He has consented then, and they can use him. So also with dogs, with birds, with anything they can get to take food from their hands. The true victim was to be the horse, whatever horse you might be riding or anyone else might be riding. They are not over scrupulous.”
— Sheri S. Tepper, Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore
[Traditional, with adaptations.]
In a certain village there lived a rabbi, famed for the time he had spent studying Talmud. One day, two villagers came to see him about a dispute. The rabbi agreed to hear them out and decide the matter for them, and a small crowd gathered around.
Chaim went first. “Moshe’s chickens have been running into my yard,” he explained, describing how they were eating from his stores and harassing his children. “Moshe needs to build a fence to keep them in.”
The rabbi frowned sadly and spread his arms in empathy. “I’m afraid that you are wrong,” he began. For fifteen minutes he spoke, quoting Torah and Talmud, explaining why Moshe and his chickens had violated none of the Law. By the end of his learned explanation, the crowd was nodding and murmuring in agreement.
Now it was Moshe’s turn. “My chickens are well-behaved and I look after them carefully,” he said. It was rare that even one chicken got out, and it never went far. “I have done all I can. If Chaim is so concerned, well then he should build a fence to keep them out.”
Again the rabbi frowned, a wistful look on his face. “I’m afraid that you too are wrong,” he said. For another fifteen minutes he spoke, quoting Torah and Talmud, explaining why Moshe had failed in his obligations towards his wayward chickens. Once again, the crowd of villagers was nodding along with him—all except one.
“They can’t both be wrong!” Herschel shouted. “First you told us that Chaim was wrong, and then you told us that Moshe was wrong. Which is it? It has to be one or the other.”
The rabbi nodded sadly. “Alas, my son, I’m afraid that you are wrong as well.”