California college disinvites Border Patrol from job fair

San Jose City College officials have disinvited U.S. Customs and Border Protection from a campus job fair in response to protests against the agency’s presence. 

“With everything that’s gone on in recent years around the issue of immigration and with Border Patrol and enforcement, that’s just not something that we’re comfortable with, bringing them to our campus,” Ryan Brown, a spokesman for San Jose City College, told NBC Bay Area. 

{mosads}The news network noted that the organizer of the event had invited Border Patrol officials to set up a booth at a campus job fair scheduled for Tuesday. 

The activist group Dump Trump San Jose took major issue with the idea, and encouraged its followers to demand that Border Patrol be prohibited from the job fair and future events at the school. It also organized a demonstration for the day of the event, which is still expected to take place.

In a Facebook post last week, the group urged activists to call San Jose City College acting President Roland Montemayor and Chancellor Byron Clift Breland. The group advised individuals to tell the college officials that the Border Patrol is a “fundamentally racist and anti-immigrant institution.”

“Immigrants make up almost 40 percent of our population and the presence of Border Patrol agents on SJ City College’s campus jeopardizes the safety of both its student body and the community at large,” a suggested script read. 

The group said in a Facebook post on Monday that U.S. Border Patrol had been removed from the job fair. The group added that it would still follow through with the scheduled campus rally to “celebrate this victory.” 

Border Patrol has been seeking to up its staff amid a surge in families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The agency announced last week that it is offering a 5 percent pay bump to agents willing to remain on the job for another year. 

An agency spokesperson told The Hill that it “respects the decision of San Jose City college students and school leadership.”

“Our main objective was to inform about the excellent, well-paid rewarding career opportunities CBP has to offer, not to conducting any law enforcement activities,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “CBP has launched a national recruiting strategy to aggressively recruit women, minorities, veterans and college students to join a world class organization responsible of keeping our borders safe while facilitating lawful international travel and trade.”