Campus police departments will not cooperate with law enforcement agencies looking to arrest those who have broken federal immigration laws, the University of California system announced Wednesday in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to ramp up deportations.

The UC’s 10 campuses will protect the privacy and civil rights of undocumented students and will continue to welcome and support students, regardless of their immigration status.

In the statement of its policy regarding undocumented immigrants, the UC system also said its hospitals, which serve the public, will “vigorously enforce university nondiscrimination and privacy policies” in treating patients.

“While we still do not know what policies and practices the incoming federal administration may adopt, given the many public pronouncements made during the presidential campaign and its aftermath, we felt it necessary to reaffirm that UC will act upon its deeply held conviction that all members of our community have the right to work, study and live safely and without fear at all UC locations,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a release.

Anita Casavantes Bradford, who heads UCI’s Committee on Equity and Inclusion for Undocumented Students, said she was reassured by Napolitano’s statement.

“They are among our most talented, motivated and engaged students,” she said. “They are an important asset to our university and our communities, and I’m glad that President Napolitano has shown, through her principled statement and actions, that she also recognizes the contributions that undocumented young people and their families make to our state.”

Across the country, a wave of campus protests and petitions are calling for sanctuary campuses and the protection of students brought to the country illegally as children. Trump has pledged to abolish a program created by Obama that offers those students temporary legal residence and a work permit. Napolitano signed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, in 2012 as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Those who oppose illegal immigration were not pleased to hear of the UC system’s stand.

“It’s radical and leftist policies like this UC announcement that caused voters to reject the Democrats on Nov. 8 and put Trump into the White House,” said John Berry, cabinet member for the Redlands Tea Party Patriots.

“Students here illegally should be deported,” he said. “If students are illegal, then why are they enrolled in the UC in the first place? Those classroom seats should be saved for people in the U.S. legally.”

Karthick Ramakrishnan, a UC Riverside public policy professor, said the UC system’s statement giving specifics on what it will not do, is stronger than calling campuses a sanctuary – a concept, he said, that can be interpreted various ways.

“What’s interesting in this moment,” Ramakrishnan said, “is that universities are taking a moral stand about what is important in terms of the educational mission and their duties of providing to students regardless of their immigration status.”