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.