College restates support for affected students amid immigration concerns

News in brief: Sustainable Bowdoin to encourage green living

On Tuesday, Sustainable Bowdoin will launch the Green Living Commitment, a program designed to help students create healthy habits and reduce their carbon footprints.
The program is a revamped version of a previous Sustainable Bowdoin initiative, Green Dorm Room Certification. Bethany Taylor, the sustainability outreach coordinator, said that the new program is designed to be more individualized.
“If you really want to recycle, but your roommate is not at all interested, you are no longer responsible for their inaction,” Taylor said.
Through a survey, students can pledge to different actions and habits for three different levels of certification: Bronze, Silver and Green. An online checklist outlines a point system, where students earn points based on their habits. Low commitment activities, such as buying a plant, earn fewer points, while higher commitment activities, like carpooling to campus, earn more points.
Additionally, participants will be entered in a raffle each month to win prizes for their dorm depending on their certification level. The higher the certification, the better the prize.
“The competition should reinforce people’s participation,” Taylor said. “It’s ongoing [and] you are encouraged to go back if you want to raise yourself up a level.”
The Green Living Commitment will run this semester in conjunction with another campus-wide energy-saving competition that will begin on February 27, International Polar Bear Day, and run through April 22, Earth Day.
Taylor hopes that the Green Living Commitment will become a permanent part of Sustainable Bowdoin’s programming.
“This semester will be focused on taking in student feedback and coming up with a better version of it to start in the fall,” she said.
To promote the Green Living Commitment, Sustainable Bowdoin will host a “Love Your Planet Valentine” event where students can write notes to each other in the spirit of the holiday.

News in brief: Deaths from drug overdose in Maine hit all-time record

Three hundred seventy-eight deaths due to drug overdose were confirmed in the state of Maine in 2016, an all-time high and a 39 percent increase from 2015, which previously held the record, according to a release by the state Attorney General’s Office on February 2.
Opioid drugs were responsible for the majority of deaths. One hundred twenty-three deaths were attributed to heroin or morphine and 195 were attributed to non-pharmaceutical fentanyl, according to data from the University of Maine-Orono. While heroin deaths only increased by 15 percent since 2015, fentanyl deaths increased by 127 percent in 2016. Fentanyl is a schedule-II prescription drug that is between 50 and 100 times more powerful than morphine, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Last Thursday, the Maine State Legislature voted unanimously to create a task force to address the opioid crisis. The panel is expected to come up with recommendations for the legislature by April 30.
Harriet Fisher ’17 spent last summer mapping arrests in Maine as part of the Gibbons Summer Research Program. She found that many arrests across the state were due to possession, trafficking or consumption of opioids.
“[The opioid epidemic] is so omnipresent in Maine,” Fisher said. “I realized it cut across so many different demographics in Maine. You can see in the maps that it is really is all over the state, but … it isn’t something you see a lot at Bowdoin.”

News in brief

College restates support for affected students amid immigration concerns

February 17, 2017

In an email to students and employees on Tuesday, Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion Leana Amáez wrote that she will serve as Bowdoin’s “point person” for students’ immigration-related issues. Amáez also reiterated the College’s commitment to supporting students affected by the immigration policies of President Donald Trump.

Amáez’s email cited deportation actions by federal immigration officers that made news last week as cause for “a heightened state of anxiety for vulnerable communities,” including members of the Bowdoin community. She noted, as President Clayton Rose has previously stated, that the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs has been in contact with students who could be affected by the policies, and continues to provide “appropriate support,” including access to legal resources.

On Tuesday, several major national news outlets reported that a 23-year-old man named Daniel Ramirez Medina, who had been protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program under the Obama administration, was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in Seattle.

Under DACA, individuals who were brought to the United States undocumented as children could register with the government and receive permission to work or attend school, as well as a two-year relief from deportation. About 750,000 immigrants are registered with DACA nationwide.

In an executive order on January 25, Trump expanded the categories of immigrants who are considered a priority for deportation. Under the Obama administration, deportation priority was mostly reserved for individuals who were convicted of a serious crime or were deemed a threat to national security, but Trump’s executive order expanded this label to include people who “have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” and gave immigration officials more discretion in deporting individuals.

Full data on the immigrants arrested by ICE since the executive order have not been made public.

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