The Open Borders University

When Biden announced that he would limit border invaders to 2,500 a day or nearly 900,000 a year, the first lawsuit filed against the move came from a University of California law school.

Formerly known as the Hastings College of the Law, Kamala’s old alma mater dumped the name of its founder, a much more qualified former Attorney General of California who funded it, in the serial woke purge and is now known as UC Law SF. But it has still kept the Hastings name on the UC Hastings Foundation whose millions are supposed to fund the school.

But instead the UC Hastings Foundation is being used to wage lawfare for open borders.

It is unknown how much of the over $11 million brought in during 2022 and the $7 million in 2023 is really used to fund border litigation. Officially, $5.8 million was marked as providing “grants to UC College”, to “enrich the academic program and provide opportunities in legal education”. But like a lot of woke law schools, UC Law SF operates or supports lawfare entities.

One of those is the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at what was once the University of California Hastings College of the Law. When Biden imposed the modest slowdown on the invasion, UC Law SF’s Center joined the ACLU and other pro-invader groups in suing America.

Even Biden’s trivially minor efforts to limit the scope of the border invasion “undermines the vital work of humanitarian and legal aid groups”, claimed Melissa Crow, formerly of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who had also served as counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy, a senior Homeland Security advisor under Obama, and is the UC Law’s Center Director of Litigation.

Karen Musalo, the Bank of America Chair in International Law, and the founding director of the UC SF Center, has warned that the “US has blood on its hands” for trying to slow the invasion.

“During Trump, my CGRS colleagues and I expended a tremendous amount of energy challenging the anti-immigrant policies that were issued on what seemed like an almost daily basis,” Musalo boasted.

Musalo is being paid over $200,000 a year and ranks as the 10th highest paid employee at UC Law SF. Crow is earning her own six figure salary even though she’s not listed as teaching any classes. The Center’s legal Director, also scores a six figure UC Law salary along with the deputy director responsible for the Center’s financial management, who is not listed as teaching any classes, but is still on UC’s payroll, as is the Center’s Director of Training, various staff attorneys and assorted technical personnel making for around $1 million in payroll expenses.

Beyond suing the United States, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at Kamala (and Willie Brown’s) old law school offers a database of “expert witnesses” willing to testify on behalf of the ‘refugee’ claims of border invaders. It urges licensed medical or mental health personnel to register to “support asylum seekers with forensic mental or physical evaluations.”

Donors are encouraged to make a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) donation to fund the Center’s destructive work through the UC Hastings Foundation. Not only is this lawfare being aided by California taxpayers, but by the IRS and the taxpayers of the United States of America.

Whether taxpayers should be forced to fund UC Law SF’s work to destroy America is one question, but whether it’s even legal is another. When UC Law SF chose to ungratefully purge its original founder, the heirs of Attorney General Serranus Clinton Hastings filed a $1.7 billion breach of contract lawsuit because he had founded the school on the condition that it “shall forever be known and designated as the Hastings College of the Law”.

(The case was lost when a California judge ruled that “shall forever be known” was binding only until the person with whom the agreement was made had been ‘canceled’ by the Left. Nor did the UC system have to return any of the money despite breaking its agreement with the family because the state is not obligated to honor contracts with those whom the Left has denounced.)

Furthermore, Article IX, Section 9 of the California Constitution states that the entire UC system is supposed to be “entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence”. Instead not only is the UC system deeply politicized, but the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies is actively waging open borders lawfare against the United States as a wholly political entity.

34 years after Kamala Harris graduated from what was then UC Hastings after the daughter of wealthy elite foreigners inappropriately benefited from the law school’s Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP) affirmative action program for disadvantaged students, Biden picked Kamala Harris to deal with the migration crisis that her alma mater is exacerbating.

UC Law SF has multiple immigration law ‘clinics’ including the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic under Richard Boswell, Musalo’s husband, and the Refugee and Human Rights Clinic which the college brags has “a close relationship with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies” and is “one of the nation’s leading refugee advocacy organizations” which “engages in impact litigation, national policy advocacy, and other strategies in defense of asylum seekers.”

Are these appropriate activities for a 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit?

Conveniently the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies operates under the umbrella of a university and its nonprofit status. And that means it might be time to drop UC Law SF’s nonprofit status the way it dropped the name of its founder and original funder.

Universities should not engage in political indoctrination and certainly not in lawfare. As Americans are murdered and cities are bankrupted by the open borders invasion, universities should not be allowed to wage war against the survival of our nation.

(Daniel Greenfield will be appearing at the AFA's Literary Cafe on July 14th, Bastille Day, at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel, to discuss the American and French revolutions and the origins of our struggle against the Left.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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