Quest Statement on Protecting International Students

On April 4, the Associated Collegiate Press, College Media Association, Journalism Education Association, National Scholastic Press Association, Quill & Scroll, and Student Press Law Center issued their first-ever Student Media Alert to advise student journalists across the country to take steps to protect international and immigrant sources in light of ICE’s recent detention of several international students for their published lawful speech. The Quest has recently begun receiving takedown requests from international students with legitimate concerns that the Trump regime will revoke their legal status for exercising their constitutionally protected free speech rights. We wish to convey to the Reed community that it is now our policy to comply with all takedown requests from international students of material pertaining to their political speech. This means that if you have authored an opinion piece which you fear the government may use as a basis to deport you, we will take it down or anonymize it immediately upon request, and if you have concerns about being quoted or pictured in another writer’s article, we will similarly remove or anonymize your quote or image. Once we satisfy your request we will destroy our records of your correspondence and ask you to do the same. Please be aware that the Quest website is archived by the Internet Wayback Machine and we are not capable of erasing all traces of your speech from the Internet.