Allston Leaders Demand Response from BU After Student Says He Called for ICE Arrests

Allston residents and Boston University alumni slammed the student president of the Boston University College Republicans after he claimed he had spent months asking Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain immigrant workers in Allston.

Immigration officers arrested nine people in a raid at an Allston car wash last Tuesday, drawing condemnation and fear among neighbors. After the BU College Republicans president made his post on X appearing to claim credit for the raid, many residents said BU had a duty to address actions that could heighten rifts between the college and the neighborhood.

Pilar Ortiz, a Boston College alumna who recently lost a bid to take Allston-Brighton’s City Council seat, called on the university to “step up” to both hold students accountable and educate them.

“This is one of the most egregious and most awful ways that you could really offend the community,” she said. “We really need to see universities step up and make sure that they're connecting students with the neighborhoods that they’re a part of.”

Jashvina Shah, a 2013 graduate and another Allston resident, called Segal’s actions “reprehensible” and said she had asked to rescind a donation she had previously pledged to BU.

“Part of being anywhere as a college is that you are part of that society and you have to be a good neighbor,” she said. “The audacity of someone to think that they have any right to say who should or should not be able to live in Allston is absolutely ridiculous.”

The BU student, Zachary Segal, posted on X last week two days after the ICE raid that “I’ve been calling ICE for months on end.”

“This week they finally responded to my request to detain these criminals,” his post continued. “As someone who lives in the neighborhood, I’ve seen how American jobs are being given away to those with no right to be here. Pump the numbers!”

The raid, carried out on Nov. 4, saw law enforcement officers detain nine workers at Allston Car Wash on Cambridge Street. A lawyer representing those detained has said that some of the employees taken hold valid work permits that they did not have time to retrieve from the car wash’s locker room.

For many Allston residents, it was the most visible and dramatic instance of ICE’s activity throughout their neighborhood since President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign started this year.

On Thursday morning, Segal — whose hometown is identified as London on his BU athlete profile — doubled down after his X post began to draw media coverage.

“We must stand up for this country,” he wrote in a post with a Boston Globe article covering his comments attached. Within hours, both posts garnered hundreds of angry comments as backlash spread within BU’s student body and beyond.

The BU College Republicans also reposted the Boston Globe article to their Instagram story this Thursday.

Neither Segal nor the College Republicans club responded to a request for comment for this story.

The College Democrats of Massachusetts wrote in a press release on Friday that Segal’s posts “reveals the rot at the heart of today’s GOP.” They called for BU to expel Segal and for the state’s universities to “declare their campuses sanctuary sites.”

Relations between the BU’s off-campus students and other Allston residents already see occasional tension, given that the neighborhood hosts the majority of BU’s 37,000 students in much of its multifamily housing. But the issues often center on noise complaints and student partying, which the Boston Police Department released a warning to the university about just this August.

A BU student calling ICE on local workers seemed to add a new level of strain to the university’s town-gown relations.

In posts circulated on a neighborhood Facebook group on Thursday residents condemned Segal in more than 200 comments and shared email templates calling for BU administrators to take disciplinary action against Segal.

Anna Leslie, who directs the Allston Brighton Health Collaborative, wrote in a statement the organization was “outraged by the cowardly, uninformed and blatantly racist action that BU student Zac Segal said he took to report on local hard working people.”

“We have a message for anyone who reports on their neighbors and forces people to live in fear: you do not scare us and you will not stop us. We will continue to stand together,” Leslie continued.

In interviews, several current residents who had also graduated from BU expressed anger towards Segal’s actions, saying that students have a responsibility to “be a good neighbor.”

Almost all of them also said the university had a responsibility to respond.

Kaitlyn M. Boseck, who lives in Allston-Brighton and graduated from BU’s school of social work in 2021, said Segal’s comments “felt personal.”

Boseck posted email templates to her professional psychotherapy website for residents and students to call on BU to discipline Segal and the College Republicans club as well as cover legal fees for detained residents.

Boseck posted another template to elected officials, asking them to investigate last week’s raid and provide more support for immigrants harmed by ICE.

Heloisa Galvão, executive director of the local nonprofit Brazilian Women’s Group and an alum of BU, said she was “totally disgusted” by Segal’s actions.

Galvão said her fellow alumni should work together to condemn Segal’s actions and contact the university administration.

“We should write letters to BU. I sent an email immediately to four students that I know there,” Galvão said. “I sent them saying this is totally unacceptable.”

“I am so ashamed, as a BU student — a BU alum — that this happened. I can’t believe this. I’m shocked. But I’m planning on calling the president tomorrow,” Galvão added.

For Michelle L. Bush, who did her medical residency at BU, Segal’s actions felt like a “betrayal.”

“It was just infuriating,” she said. “It’s wrong, no matter how you slice it, no matter who he was, but to have it turn out to be this 20 year old who’s not even a member of our community.”

A Boston University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

—Staff writer Angelina J. Parker can be reached at angelina.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinajparker.

—Staff writer Emily T. Schwartz can be reached at emily.schwartz@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @EmilySchwartz37.